Responding to Walt’s rhetorical criticism
If you advance to the two minute thirty-five second point of this interview of Mitchell Baker and John Lilly, you’ll hear Walt Mossberg remark about the quality of Mozilla’s localizations by saying,
“I have a deep distrust of somebody who I don’t know to be actually responsible for the quality of the end product.”
We’ve heard that before, haven’t we? To entertain the point, I’ll answer a question, “Just how do we know that our translated product is high quality?” by linking to several posts (with very brief summaries) as a response to Mossberg’s rhetorical criticism.
- Testing the latest localized version of Firefox 3.5 — In this post, I ask our localizers to test a release, with specific steps that each locale can follow.
- Moving a locale out of beta — This is a basic software release principle. No, our localizers don’t get a free pass into “official status”. We give each locale a proper amount of time to bake so the beta users can provide feedback to our localizers. After feedback is “triaged”, bugs are fixed, and signs of user adoption become obvious, we move a locale out of beta.
- Localization-QA survey results — At the end of 2008, we conducted a survey to gauge our teams’ testing efforts. The posted results point us to where localizers might need our assistance. From this, we have begun an experiment to provide a third-party QA service to help test a sample of our localized versions.
- Adding contextual information to a localized build – Some of our localizers even create, share, and use customized tools to help perfect translations
Perhaps it’s hard to express without sounding naive or idealistic, but maybe there is an important theme that didn’t make Mossberg’s conversation that should be articulated:
We take localization very seriously. This is not just a hobby for our community, and many have the battle scars to prove it. Just ask someone who has stayed up all night to perfect a translation before a code freeze and you’ll understand what I am getting at. Each of our localizers is keenly aware that greater than fifty percent of our end-users are NOT using an en-US version. When a localizer is responsible for a translation, the quality of their work impacts a massive amount of end users. We could ask our German localizer Kadir, whose localized version of Firefox is being used by an estimated twenty-five million people. Or, Romi, our Indonesian localizer, who’s translated version has climbed to sixty-three percent market share. That level of impact keeps our localizers sharp and tremendously dedicated.
Other highlights from the transcript:
“Walt: 71 of the foreign-language versions of Firefox are written by volunteers. Why should I use a product like that? Lilly says Mozilla has a system for verifying the quality of these other versions and vets them prior to release. Beyond that, users will alert the company to any problems.”
“Walt: Why wouldn’t it just be better for the consumer to go with the company that’s hired experts to do its translations? Baker: How much software do you really think is great? Walt: Not very much. Lilly: But it’s all written by experts. Walt nods, point taken.”
NB: John Lilly mentions that we’ll have seventy-one localizations for Firefox 3.5. We’re growing everyday! We are actually going to ship seventy-three localizations for Firefox 3.5’s release candidate, with an outside chance of seventy-five for final release.
It’s been my impression that most “expert translation” is sub-par, so I’m glad we don’t just push the problem onto some hired company, and assume money will make it perfect.
To comment on Mossberg’s disbelief in the power of community wrt localization: the fact that the translations are made by volunteers only increases their quality. The localizers take pride in the end product they contribute to. Its popularity, visibility and the mission behind it are they real motivation, which makes them polish the translations to the very last minute, if possible. I’d argue that this is less true for the majority of commercial translators, though not all of them, obviously.
Another thing is that our localizers are also very active users, many of them using nightly builds to test both the product and its localization. So even on Saturday evening, checking movie showtimes for the night, they have their eyes open for any l10n bugs. It’s about the passion the localizers have for this project, something that’s possible thanks to the community and the volunteer spirit of it.
Axel also weighed in on his blog:
http://blog.mozilla.com/axel/2009/05/29/the-folks-we-know/
Great response, Seth.
If I could use Firefox in another language, I’d say “keep up the good work.”
I assumed Walt would have digested “Here Comes Everybody” or “The Cluetrain Manifesto.”
I loved that part. And a huge thank you to Mitchell and John, it was awesome how they turned his argument upside down. He was apparently not expecting that
And it was great to see how both of them were thinking exactly the same thing. And by the way: just because you are not paid to do something, doesn’t mean you’re not an expert. It’s sad that being a volunteer is still confused with being an amateur.
From your quotes, it seems Walts criticisms of translations are exactly the same that use to be used against open source software in the past. If he hasn’t come father than that, why is he still relevant?
And having worked on a project with professional translations into 20+ languages and seen how bad they can be, I really don’t Mozilla would have anything to gain by buying that part of the development process.
Great article, Seth! One thing I’d like to add here is that relying on volunteers enable us to cover languages that would not make sense to do if we were a commercial venture. I remember the Netscape days where I had to argue a lot with the management to get a version of Communicator for Spanish. Now with Firefox and the localization volunteers, we’re able to have Firefox available in the four official languages of Spain (Basque, Catalan, Galician and Spanish). I’m pretty sure that it would not make commercial sense to cover all four languages (no return on investment). But for local users, having a browser in their native language is very important, particularly if there are a small number of speakers of this language…