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Categories: L10n Reports Planet

L10N Report: February Edition

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Welcome!

New localizers

  • Kumar has recently joined us to localize in Angika. Welcome Kumar!
  • Francesca has joined Pontoon to localize Firefox in Friulan. Do you speak the language? Join her!

Are you a locale leader and want us to include new members in our upcoming reports? Contact us!

New community/locales added

  • Mixteco Yucuhiti (“meh”) locale was recently added to our l10n repositories and will soon have single-locale builds to test Firefox Android on!
  • Angika (“anp”) locale was added to Pontoon and will soon start to localize Focus for Android. Welcome!
  • Friulan (“fur”) has been enabled in Pontoon to localize Firefox, starting from old translations recovered from Pootle.

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

Migration to FTL (Fluent)

In the past releases we reached a few small but important milestones for the Fluent project:

  • Firefox 58 was released on January 23 with the first ever Fluent string.
  • Firefox 59, which will be released on March 13, has 4 more Fluent strings. For this milestone we focused on the migration tools we created to seamlessly port translations from the old format (.properties, .DTD) to Fluent.

For Firefox 60, currently in Nightly, we aim to migrate as many strings as possible to Fluent for Firefox Preferences. The process for these migrations is detailed in this email to dev-l10n, and there are currently 2 patches almost ready to land, while a larger one for the General pane is in progress.

While Pontoon’s documentation already had a section dedicated to Fluent, constantly updated as the interface evolves, our documentation now has a section dedicated to Fluent for localizers, explaining the basic syntax and some of the specific features available in Gecko.

Plural forms

We already talked about plurals in the December report. The good news is that strings using the wrong number of plural forms are now reported on the l10n dashboard (example). Here’s a summary of all you need to know about plurals.

How plurals work in .properties files
Plural forms in Firefox and Firefox for Android are obtained using a hack on top of .properties files (plural forms are separated by a semicolon). For example:

#1 tab has arrived from #2;#1 tabs have arrived from #2

English has 2 plural forms, one for singular, and one for all other numbers. The situation is much more complex for other languages, reaching up to 5 or 6 plural forms. In Russian the same string has 3 forms, each one separated from the other by a semicolon:

С #2 получена #1 вкладка;С #2 получено #1 вкладки;С #2 получено #1 вкладок

The semicolon is a separator, not a standard punctuation element:

  • You should evaluate and translate each sentence separately. Some locales start the second sentence lowercase because of the semicolon, or with a leading space. Both are errors.
  • You shouldn’t replace the semicolon with a character from your script, or another punctuation sign (commas, periods). Again, that’s not a punctuation sign, it’s a separator.

Edge cases
Sometimes English only has one form, because the string is used for cases where the number is always bigger than 1.

;Close #1 tabs

Note that this string has still two plural forms, the first form (used for case ‘1’, or singular in English) is empty. That’s why the string starts with a semicolon. If your locale only has 1 form, you should drop the leading semicolon.

In other cases, the variable is indicated only in the second form:

Close one tab;Close #1 tabs

If your locale only has 1 form, or use the first case for more than ‘1’, use the second sentence as reference for your translation.

There are also cases of “poor” plural forms, where the plural is actually used as a replacement for logic, like “1 vs many”. These are bugs, and should be fixed. For example, this string was fixed in Firefox 59 (bug 658191).

Known limitations
Plurals form in Gecko are supported only in .properties files, and JavaScript code (not C++).

What about devtools?
If your locale has more plural forms than English, and you’re copying and pasting English into DevTools strings, the l10n dashboard will show warnings.

You can ignore them, as there’s no way to exclude locales from DevTools, or fix them by creating the expected number of plural forms by copying the English text as many times as needed.

Future of plurals
With Fluent, plurals become much more flexible, allowing locales to create special cases beyond the number of forms expected for their language.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

You might have noticed that Focus (iOS/Android) has been on a hiatus since mid-December 2017. That’s because the small mobile team is focusing on Firefox for Amazon Fire TV development at the moment!

We should be kicking things off again some time in mid-February. A firm date is not confirmed yet, but stay tuned on our dev-l10n mailing list for an upcoming announcement!

In the meantime, this means we are not shipping new locales on Focus, and we won’t be generating screenshots until the schedule resumes.

For Firefox on Fire TV – we are still figuring out which locales are officially supported by Amazon, and going to set up the l10n repositories to open it up to Mozilla localizations. There should also a language switcher in the works very soon, too.

Concerning the Firefox for iOS schedule, it’s almost time to kick-off l10n work for v11! Specific dates will be announced shortly – but expect strings to arrive towards the end of the month. March 29 will be the expected release date.

On the Firefox for Android front, we’ve now released v58. With this new version we bring you two new locales: Nepali (ne-NP) and Bengali from Bangladesh (bn-BD)!

We’re also in the process of adding Tagalog (tl), Khmer (km) and Mixteco Yucuhiti (meh) locales to all-locales to start Fennec single-locale builds.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

  • Marketing:
    • Firefox email: The team in charge of the monthly project targeting 6 locales will start following the standard l10n process by email team using bugzilla to communicate the initial requests, Pontoon to host the content, and l10n-driver sending the request through mailing list. Testing emails for verification purpose will be sent to those who worked on the project for the month. The process change has been communicated to the impacted communities. Thanks for responding so well to the change.
    • Regional single language request will also follow the standard process, moving localization tasks from Google docs to Pontoon. If you are pinged by marketing people for these requests through email or bugzilla, please let the l10n-drivers know. We want to make Pontoon the source of truth, the tool for community collaboration, for future localization references, consistency of terminology usage, for tracking contribution activity.
    • Mozilla.org has a slow start this year. Most updates have been cleanups and minor fixes. There have been discussions on redesigning the mozilla.org site so the entire site has a unified and modern look from one page to another. This challenges the current way of content delivery, which is at page level. More to share in the upcoming monthly reports.
  • AMO-Linter, a new project is enabled on Pontoon. This features target add-ons developers. As soon as the information on the feature, the release cycle, the staging server is available, the AMO documentation and Pontoon will be updated accordingly. In the meantime, report bugs by filing an issue.
  • Firefox Marketplace will be officially shut down on March 30th. Email communication was sent in English. However, a banner with the announcement was placed on the product in top 5 languages.

What’s new or coming up in Foundation projects

Our 2017 fundraising campaign just finished, but we’re already kicking off this year’s campaign.
One area we want to improve is our communication with donors, so starting in February we will send a monthly donor newsletter. This will help us better communicate how donations are put to use, and build a trust relationship with our supporters.
We will also start raising money much earlier. Our first fundraising email will be a fun one for Valentine’s Day.

A quick update on other localized campaigns:

  • The *Privacy not included website is being redesigned to remove the holiday references, and some product reviews might be added soon.
  • We expect to have some actions this spring around GDPR in Europe, but there is no concrete plan yet.
  • We’ve got some news on the Copyright reform — the JURI Committee will be tentatively voting on March 27th, so we will do some promotion of our call tool over the next few weeks.

The final countdown has started for the Internet Health Report! The second edition is on its way and should be published in March, this time again in English, German, French and Spanish.

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

  • On February 3, Pontoon passed 3,000 registered users. Congratulations to Balazs Zubak for becoming the 3,000th registered user of Pontoon!
  • We’re privileged to have VishalCR7, karabellyj and maiquynhtruong join the Pontoon community of contributors recently. Stay tuned for more details about the work they are doing coming up soon in a blog post!

Friends of the Lion

Image by Elio Qoshi

Shout out to Adrien G, aka Alpha, for his continuous dedication to French localization on Pontoon and his great progress! He is now an official team member, and we’re happy to have him take on more responsibilities. Congrats!

Know someone in your l10n community who’s been doing a great job and should appear here? Contact on of the l10n-drivers and we’ll make sure they get a shout-out (see list at the bottom)!

Useful Links

Questions? Want to get involved?

Did you enjoy reading this report? Let us know how we can improve by reaching out to any one of the l10n-drivers listed above.

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