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Localizing Firefox 3 (post 3 in a series of 3)
Abdulkadir Topal is the lead localizer for Mozilla in German. As many of you know, Germany is a country where Firefox has some of its highest marketshare. (The XiTi monitor study from March, 2008 claims that the marketshare is at 35%.) It’s probably not too far of a stretch to say this, but our success in Germany is, in large part, due to the efforts of Abdulkadir and his team.
I’ll let you read about his story…
This concludes the brief series of stories from localizers who worked on Firefox 3. I tried to choose three individuals who represent different aspects of our localiation community:
- Friedel Wolff is a tools developer and localizer in Afrikaans
- Ankit Patel localizes Gujarati in a country of growing importance on the Web and for Mozilla
- Abdukadir Topal represents the localizer team in a country where Firefox has sizable market share
I hope this has been a nice snapshot into what it’s like to be a localizer and how imporant it is to Mozilla and its users. We so greatly respect all the work that our community does to make our products a good experience for users in their communities, and it would not be possible without our localizations teams.
Thanks, everyone!
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Grant to Translate.org.za
Last month, Mozilla approved a grant to the software localization organization Translate.org.za (Translate) to help improve their Translate Toolkit. We did this because Mozilla and Translate’s missions are very well aligned, as both organizations are motivated by promoting openness and opportunity on the Internet. Because so many Mozilla (and FOSS) localizers use Translate’s software, we hope that our support will help amplify the impact they are having in so many translation communities. Therefore, we are giving a grant to Translate for $70,000 to advance their mission by further developing tools for open source software translation.
More on the grant
In the past, I’ve blogged about similar grant making efforts (See grant to PCF). When Mozilla distributes a grant to individuals or organizations, we stress leverage as we seek the best ways to support our community. This grant to Translate fits well into that paradigm.
Translate’s software is used by several Mozilla localization communities (presently 17 different teams) who work so hard to translate Mozilla software perfectly so that it can ship in their native languages. Also, it is our hope that Mozilla will be able to use Translate’s Toolkit platform as one of a few starting points to improve our localization process (see Verbatim). So many member of our community create tools to enhance localization and Translate is one of the many that has made great progress.
More on Translate.org.za’s Toolkit
The Translate Toolkit provides several programs and utilities that help during the stages of localization. It provides file converters and tools to help in quality assurance and project management. Once a standard localization format is used, it creates possibilities for writing tools that operate on well understood localization formats. The software can also provide rich functionality for project management, quality measurement, and quality assurance.
If you are familiar with their software, Translate’s Toolkit can
- migrate translations during the life cycle of the software project
- identify new or changed translations on a product upgrade
- estimate the required work for translating a new application or updating existing translations
- compare with or reuse translations from previous localization projects
- test for certain localization errors (critical, functional or cosmetic), avoiding “breakage” of the localized application
- choose from a wide selection of localization tools (FOSS or proprietary)
- review translations, since the source and target text are always associated
- build a language pack for immediate testing of changes made, even from partially translated files.
As you can see, the toolkit provides a lot of the basic building blocks that are required for making localization easier. It also provides rich functionality for application developers on which to base their localization software, something Mozilla is very interested in doing in the near future.
If you haven’t check out the software yet, you can start by viewing these great screencasts from project leaders, Dwayne Bailey and Friedel Wolff.
Going forward
Wil Clouser is the Mozilla engineer who has been working on localization and has taken leadership in developing what we are now calling our Verbatim project (referenced above). Verbatim will be using Translate Toolkit (specifically Pootle) as a starting point for our effort to improve our localization platform.
As alluded to earlier, for all the localizers in the Mozilla community who wish to use Translate’s software for their localizations, Dwayne and his team will be working to improve the existing toolkit.
As a side benefit, Translate’s toolkit can ensure that important translation files for Mozilla applications can be converted to other translation formats used in FOSS. This allows collaboration with other FOSS localizers and can make it easier for others to join.
Perhaps you’ll agree with me that Translate is doing fantastic work to make the translation of FOSS software better for everyone.
Thanks
Many thanks to Axel Hecht (Pike on IRC), Mic Berman, Pascal Chevrel, Chris Hofmann, and Wil Clouser. Each of these individuals played an instrumental role in evaluating this project.
Most of all, special thanks to Dwayne Bailey and Friedel Wolff and the team at Translate.org.za. They hung with us through a long and, at times, tedious process, answering our questions and giving us all the data we needed to produce an really well-informed decision.
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Full Page Zoom
In my opinion, one of the coolest features of Firefox 3 is full page zoom. From the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the layout, text and images.
I’ve used it so many times when images or text are small and I want a scaled up view of the details. Also, I have to admit that sometimes my eyes get a little tired and it’s nice to scale text to a bigger size so I can read without focusing too closely.
How do you use Full Page Zoom?
So, before we get too far into it, here’s how to use full page zoom…
I use a Mac and love keyboard shortcuts, so I press Command and the “+” sign to zoom in. Command and the “-” sign pulls me back out. You can also go to the View –> Zoom menu and zoom in and out from there. When hitting the command “+”, I can zoom in over and over again until the image or text I am viewing scales up to the desired size. Once I am finished, I hit command “-” to take me back to the state I want.
(On a PC, you can use similar keystrokes with Ctrl + and Ctrl -. Or, go to that view menu again…)
And, if you prefer it the old way, where you can zoom in on just the text, select the “Zoom Text Only” option under the View –> Zoom –> Zoom Text Only. With that setting activated, you’re back to zooming just text.
One final note, when you zoom in and out, the state of that page persists. If you navigate away from the site but come back to it later, the zoom state will remain. This can be very handy for many reasons, not the least of which is accessibility. Readers who prefer a much larger text for reading will not have to re-zoom every time they visit their favorite sites.
What’s in that tide pool?
Let me give an example of how I have used this recently. My friend Jordan puts all of his wonderful photography on his site he calls Nomadic Planet. Recently, Jordan has started experimenting with high dynamic range photography (or HDR for short). HDR allows photographers to take several photographs with different light settings to create a more dynamic range of exposures. Nifty software allows the photographer to then combine all those shots into one, resulting in a final photograph with a depth of field that shows great detail in the foreground all the way to the background.
Jordan describes this as a beautiful sunset at the end of the road in north Kau’i at Ke’e Beach State Park in Hanalei, Hawaii. It’s a 3-exposure HDR taken on April 27, 2008.
But, I really like tide pools. And, because Jordan’s HDR technique provides so much detail in the entire landscape, I want to zoom in on the bottom left corner to see if I can find any little shells or starfish or whatever.
Voila, FULL PAGE ZOOOOOOOMMM!!!!!
Here’s the shot from my browser (I uploaded the screenshots to Flickr to allow me blog this…)
Anyone see a starfish? I don’t. But, thanks to full page zoom, I was able to get very close to the area I wanted to investigate.
Want more technical background on it?
Robert O’Callahan did two interesting posts about this feature a while back. The first post you might want to read came in February of 2007 and discusses a patch landed by Eli Friedman that “is a major cleanup of the way we work with length units in Gecko.” The second post worth reading again discusses the behavior the zoom implementation.
Without a shred of knowledge about this computer science behind this feature, I found these two posts really interesting. Thanks to Roc for passing them my way as background.
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Localizing Firefox 3 and Thunderbird (post 2 in a series of 3)
Ankit Patel is the lead localizer for Firefox and Thunderbird in his native language of Gujarati. Last year, when Chofmann and I went to India, Ankit was instrumental in helping me set up a productive visit for us. In his post, he writes about what it took for him to localize Firefox and Thunderbird.
I asked Ankit to write his story for several reasons. First, he has been a long-time contributor to open source projects and very dedicated to Mozilla. Additionally, I wanted to showcase the story of a localizer who is creating a translation for a community in a high Internet growth region like India.
In the last post, Friedel, who is a tools developer and translator, wrote about his experience. This is a bit of a different story about a localizer in a region of growing importance to Mozilla…
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More on the Screencast Contest
We are in the third week of the Screencast Contest, which has gotten a good number of submissions, but could certainly use some more. Early next week, we’ll start our final push to get more videos submitted, and the contest will close on June 15th. If you haven’t submitted a screencast yet, please go visit the contest home page, pick an article, and submit your entry.
In addition to shining a bit more light on the contest, I thought I would also take this opportunity to explain a bit about why I got involved and what went into it.
I met up with David Tenser at FOSDEM in February and asked him what we could do to empower more community members to contribute to SUMO. Our idea was pretty straight forward and focused: to empower community members to help build a more robust knowledge base for Firefox Support.
One way to make that knowledge base more helpful for end-users was to create screencasts for the most often reviewed articles. And so, the Screencast contest was created.
We had a lot of options to consider when we first dreamed up this idea. Would we host the video? What software could everyone use to film? How do we choose the articles for the contest? David had thought a lot about this and had most of these qustions answered. We wouldn’t host videos, but encouraged participants to use Jing Software to do the screencasts. David also had a way of isolating the top 100 most frequently visited articles.
But, how would we promote it? Would we create something like Operation Firefox that had a separately-branded microsite? Or, would we use existing tools like Spread Firefox to showcase the contest. We chose the latter for a few reasons:
- Leverage: (there’s that word again…) We didn’t have any external costs related to a third-party design firm. Also, we were able to get front-page placement on Spread Firefox for the first week of the contest.
- Timing: We could move pretty swiftly since the Spread Firefox platform was built to help do projects like this.
- Ease: With all the effort our community has put into creating SFx, it was clearly easiest for us to use the tool that’s been designed for something like this.
I created the contest rules with Catherine Brady (one of Mozilla’s legal gurus) and wrote a lot of the content you see on the contest pages. David chose all the articles that are featured in the contest and wrote a lot of the content for the site as well. Finally, Tara came in and designed some really great art for us to use.
This was one of the more efficient and tightly run projects I’ve worked on. We met each week for about three weeks and just kept knocking off tasks left and right. I had the benefit of helping to guide the Operation Firefox campaign, so I lifted a lot from that experience. Many thanks to David and Tara for working so hard with me to launch this thing.
Finally, a huge thanks to the community. From your hard work, the SUMO knowledge base will have *hopefully* 100 great screencasts for more than 150 million users to access if they are having trouble with Firefox. Very nice.
community website
