44 locales in 4 days
When Firefox goes through a major update, our teams work on how to communicate that update to our users. The message tells users why, what’s better, and what to do. As you may know, greater than 50% of our users are not using the English-U.S. version of our browser, so you can imagine the importance of localizing that eventual message that hits the end-user.
On Monday evening (Pacific time), Pascal filed bug 451128, requesting that our localizers translate strings for the major update “billboard” that we push to end-users for the major update from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3.
Today, Pascal resolved that bug as fixed. In four short days, our community translated the strings for 44 different locales. Pascal’s comment in the thread is a nice celebration of the hard work that went into this effort:
“With this last translation, we have completed the task for 44 locales in 4 days! Congrats to all of you…”
Perhaps that’s not enough emphasis or thanks, so let me also chime in with a huge thank you to the localizers and to Pascal for managing the process!
How to improve?
With this acknowlegment, it also seems best to mention some areas where Mozilla can improve to make the process better for localizers so that next time it’s not such a crunch. I thought of two areas specifically related to this last effort:
- Timing: Although our community completed this in four days, it would be nice if we can give our localizers the work to be translated with much more time in advance.
- Details: We should hammer out small details (like iframe window sizes so teams translating know what they have to work with when translating) and communicate that early.
Did I miss other points?
One of our team’s quarterly goals is to draft an l10n requirements document that we will pass over to the development team. Bits of information like the above will go into that document. As we get closer to writing that document, I’ll be sure to call for ideas. How can we make the process better as it relates to what we can communicate to our development team? Your comments are welcome.
But, just to reiterate Pascal’s point, thank you to all the localizers. What a terrific effort!
This is just amazing.
It already came up somewhere, I think, but I think it should be noted here as well.
We should add “localize the Major Update billboard strings” to the checklist of things that must be translated when we ship a new version in a particular locale.
Not sure if I worded that quite right but the idea is that when we ship Firefox 3.1, part of the process, and a go/no-go checklist item, should be: “did you translate the 3.0 -> 3.1 Major Update Billboard?”
- A
Good point, Asa.
Another way to look at it would be that the development and marketing team has to have everything ready before we do a major release…including strings that need to be translated that relate to a major update. Translating a few more strings may not be a hard task to add to the translation process. But, asking localizers to turn around quick translations for a major update certainly is not easy to coordinate or all that fair to the lives of our localizers.
If you mention the iframe size issue – I want to admit that some of us, including me, are still looking to that information, in order to make sure our layout won’t break in the update dialog. I’ve asked people on #l10n and they have no clue.
Please advice.
@Tomer: I am trying to dig it up myself. I guess I should have made it clear in my post that we (the l10n-ers) were not given that information initially and many are still in search of it.
I’ll post the answer when I find it…have already pinged people about the issue. Apologies…
Hey Tomer – the width of the element in the upgrade dialogs depends on a bunch of factors, primarily OS and locale:
On OSX…
- the window width is defined in em by window.macWidth:
http://mxr.mozilla.org/l10n-mozilla1.8/search?string=window.macWidth&find=updates.dtd&findi=&filter=^[^]*%24&hitlimit=&tree=l10n-mozilla1.8
- the box is centered between 23px of padding on either side
On Windows and Linux…
- the window width is defined in em by window.width:
http://mxr.mozilla.org/l10n-mozilla1.8/search?string=window.width&find=updates.dtd&findi=&filter=^[^]*%24&hitlimit=&tree=l10n-mozilla1.8
- the box is centered between 44px of padding on either side
Sadly, em reacts to the default font size on the user’s computer, but I don’t think there’s a lot we can do about that.
Localizers should be able to test the Major Update now by installing Firefox 2.0.0.16 and setting it to use the beta channel (or installing the Release Channel Switching add-on)
I’ve opened a bug about issues we found in Hebrew. Please note that at least some of the issues can be solved. You are welcome to CC yourself.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=451830