Please note some of the information provided in this report may be subject to change as we are sometimes sharing information about projects that are still in early stages and are not final yet.
Welcome!
Are you a locale leader and want us to include new members in our upcoming reports? Contact us!
New content and projects
We’re reaching the end of 2021, so it’s a good time to think back on what we were able to accomplish thanks to the amazing support of our community.
We had over 1,400 active contributors — with more than one translation submitted — who translated almost half a million strings (483,329 as of December 13, if you’re curious). For Firefox alone, we had over 168 thousand translations added to Pontoon.
Firefox desktop – A year in numbers
In 2021 we shipped two major releases of Firefox (MR1, MR2). MR1 was especially heavy on content changes, as we organically reviewed all menus and settings to make them simpler and easier to understand. That project alone involved almost 1200 new strings between January and April. The community was simply amazing in tackling that huge project, with several locales managing to ship a fully localized product, despite some inevitable last minute changes.
You can take a trip down memory lane by looking at the archive of Firefox l10n newsletters, which was also started this year to support the MR1 release.
In terms of locale coverage, we were able to add a new locale to release, Scots (sco), while 3 more were added to Nightly builds: Santali (sat), Sardinian (sc), Tajik (tg).
2021 mobile
2021 was quite a year for mobile! We launched a Focus for iOS and Android refresh, and like Firefox desktop, went through two major releases for Firefox for iOS and Android. There were over 21k translations done over the year, just for Firefox for Android!
Some more numbers:
- For Firefox for Android, 103 locales total shipped as part of MR1 and MR2.
- For Firefox for iOS, 91 locales total shipped as part of MR1 and MR2.
- Focus for Android launched its refresh with 100 locales, while Focus for iOS launched with 78 locales.
All these numbers are incredible and show the hard work localizers put into making all these products available globally. We want to thank you all for the dedication you have shown, it is very humbling to see.
2021 was also the year where we experimented with two small localization pilot events on Zoom. Given the success and interest in doing more online workshops, we hope to extend these in 2022. Stay tuned!
Once more, thank you all for having made 2021 a success for localization across products!
Web Projects in 2021
AMO
In 2021, nearly 130 million users visited the site from 250 countries, regions and language combinations. More than 60% were non-English users, with Simplified Chinese seeing the biggest increase year-over-year in users and sessions compared to last year.
Firefox Accounts
This year, the product continues code migration to Fluent, primarily focusing on the email features. The feature of the subscription platform has expanded to support products like VPN and Relay.
For the past month, the top five languages with successful registrations on Firefox Accounts are Dutch, Japanese, Korean, and Russian, and Simplified Chinese. We really appreciate the fast turnaround on new strings lately.
Firefox Relay
We were able to expand Firefox Relay into 18 languages, making privacy more accessible to more people, adding to the success of our Relay Premium release.
Before we started translations, the entire experience was in English. Today, around 50% of our website visitors have their browser set to a language other than English, with German being the highest non-English language (17%) and French next at 7%.
Mozilla.org
Mozilla.org receives over 1.5 Billion visits a year. According to our analytics, half of our visitors have their browser preference set to a non-English language. In 2021, the overall traffic share of non-English visitors increased by ~1%. Conversion rate for Firefox downloads for non-English users improved by 2.55% (!!). We improved our bounce rate among non-english visitors by 1%.
We were able to take our VPN product and product landing page from being an English-only product, to being available in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Ireland, and the Netherlands. This resulted in significant contributions to our VPN subscription goals for the year.
What’s new or coming up in SuMo
Q4 was packed up with releases. In addition to the MR2 launch, we also supported the Relay Premium launch and Firefox Suggest. But not only releases, we’re currently helping with the deprecation plan for Firefox Lockwise too.
This quarter, we also started to build closer relationships with the mobile team by starting a release report newsletter specifically for mobile products. This will be something that we’ll continue to deliver on a regular basis on top of the existing Desktop report.
In terms of article localization, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, and Simplified Chinese, continue to be the top locales based on page views. However, unlike the first top 3 locales, we’re struggling with Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. Help is surely welcomed for those 2 locales.
2021 was full of changes and experimentation. We said goodbye to Madalina and Joni but also welcomed new folks like Fabi, Daryl, Joe and Abby. We’ve experimented with video, data classification for major releases, moved Play Store Support from the Reply Tool to Conversocial, experimented with content for @FirefoxSupport, and lots of other things.
In 2021, our platform gathered almost 350 millions page views (345,504,433 to be exact) per 12/16, with 57.7% of them being from non-English locales. This number reflects just how important the localization communities are for our support team. We can’t thank them enough for their relentless support to help Firefox users.
Next year, we’re anticipating to support more premium products as well as continue to grow our peer to peer support. Building closer relationships with various teams internally is also another thing we’re looking forward to in 2022.
And as always, you’re more than welcome to join our Matrix or our contributor forum to talk more about anything related to support!
What’s new or coming up in Pontoon
Improved Insights
We’ve added a “Time to review suggestions” chart to the locale insights tab. The previous “Age of unreviewed suggestions” chart is still available via the control underneath the chart.
Separately, we’ve made the review and translation activity charts available on a per-project basis, so the “Insights” tab now shows up when looking at a project by itself, as well as within a team.
Revealing Adjacent Strings
Thanks to some significant and patient work by Mitchell, results in the entity search panel now have a new expand-button, which reveals the strings immediately before and after the selected string in its source file. This should make it not only easier to navigate between related strings, but also may provide valuable context where it’s not otherwise available.
Privacy and Security – Mozilla VPN Client, MAC add-on
This year we introduced a couple of new projects developed by the Privacy and Security team: Mozilla VPN Client, Firefox Multi-account Containers add-on.
Mozilla VPN Client was particularly important to show how the community can be an asset for Mozilla. Thanks to their amazing work, we were able to move from supporting 1 locale (American English) and 6 countries, to 28 locales and 15 countries. With the help of our volunteers, we can support locales that other commercial organizations will never care about, making products truly accessible.
The localized version of Firefox Multi-account Containers will be released in early 2022, but we already have about 30 locales ready to go.
Events
Want to showcase an event coming up that your community is participating in? Reach out to any l10n-driver and we’ll include that (see links to emails at the bottom of this report)
Friends of the Lion
Know someone in your l10n community who’s been doing a great job and should appear here? Contact one of the l10n-drivers and we’ll make sure they get a shout-out (see list at the bottom)!
Useful Links
- #l10n-community channel on Element (chat.mozilla.org)
- Localization category on Discourse
- L10n blog
Questions? Want to get involved?
- If you want to get involved, or have any question about l10n, reach out to:
- Delphine – l10n Project Manager for mobile
- Peiying (CocoMo) – l10n Project Manager for mozilla.org, marketing, and legal
- Francesco Lodolo (flod) – l10n Project Manager for desktop
- Théo Chevalier – l10n Project Manager for Mozilla Foundation
- Matjaž – Pontoon dev
- Eemeli – Pontoon, Fluent dev
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.
No comments yet
Post a comment