Check out this tool from Pike.  He calls it the l10n dashboard.  It’s a great snapshot into the state of Mozilla l10n community.  I’d say it’s a work in progress with a way to go, but so far, it’s very well put together.

As our team tries to improve efficiency and outreach/service to localizers in our l10n process, this tool will greatly help in how we focus on and respond to community needs related to localization.

My best suggestion is to click through and start playing with it, asking questions along the way on this blog.  We can help explain what might be unclear.

But, here’s a brief set of some of the things you can do to get you started.

Main Page

The landing page is all 65 localizations that are presently a part of Mozilla’s build process.  This does not mean we ship 65 localizations…it means that they are in CVS and can be built nightly and tested.  Nota bene, this does not include language packs.

Top navigation of the table

Each column header is sortable.  (Do we need to make that more clear?  Not sure if it’s clear to me at first glance that you can play with this chart.)  The first column is the language code and it is sorted alphabetically, with af (Afrikaans) first.

The second column is titled “Tree” and two values:  “trunk” and “incubator”.  Trunk means the builds are on the Firefox 3.0 trunk in CVS.  Incubator means that we need to migrate the locales over to 3.0.  When I saw this, I immediately began to ask, “What have we done to reach out directly to those locales in the incubator to see what we can to do to get them onto the trunk?”  We’re working on it…

The next column is a “percentage complete/changed”.   You might ask, how could anything ship with anything less that 100% complete?  Or,  what does “complete/changed” actually mean?  Let me give an example.  Someone in the es-AR localization may not have a translation for a country name of an island located in the Pacific ocean.  That string will not be changed.  But, it doesn’t mean that es-AR cannot ship a near-perfect version of Firefox for its users.  Does that make sense?  There are lots of entities in our code that just are not going to have a translation in some locales.

The “missing” columns shows you all the locales that will not build because they have missing pieces that need translation.  If you sort on missing to show all the builds that have missing values, you’ll see that it is the same number as the “failure” link, which is just under “success”.  This means that those localizations teams are working very hard to get their builds ready to ship in 3.0.2 (or later)…or that they have yet to be migrated over to Firefox 3 and still haven’t finished localizing Firefox 2.

Other stuff

On the right side, you’ll see a bunch of boxes.  Click around with those and you’ll start to see how we are trying to manage our own capacity and work flow.  Sadly, we are not automatons (Ken Kovash is the only robot at Mozilla), so we need to figure out where we can help our localizers.

Click “reset all filters” at the top.  Then, in the bottom box on the right hand side called “Shipped in…”, click on “Missing this field…”  You’ll see 17 localizations that have not shipped in Firefox 3.  Bingo!  This is the focal point.  How do we get these 17 into Firefox 3??  We’ve reached out directly to a lot of these in the past four weeks, making time for personal IRC meetings, emails, IMs, etc.  Check out bug 442935.  After these meetings, we landed 8 new languages with this bug to the build process.  In total, ten new localizations have been added in the recent past.  We’re making progress and have a lot to do like working with communities to get the localizations ready to ship.   If you’re in the dashboard’s “list of 17″ and haven’t heard from us, we’ll probably ping you soon.  But, don’t hesitate to contact us because we want to hear from you.

Pike, Mic, Pascalc, Chofmann, and I talk almost daily on how we can improve this dashboard.  It’s really a great tool and much, muCH, MUCH thanks to Pike and Pascalc for putting this together.  If you have ideas, I’d really encourage you to participate.  This is a perfect chance to get involved and make your ideas a part of the future of Mozilla l10n.

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