• L10n web dashboard improvements

    June 1st, 2009 by seth bindernagel with no comments »

    At the beginning of this quarter, the l10n-drivers set a goal to improve our dashboards so people could begin to use them as both communication platforms and better aggregators of l10n information.  Among the many things he is presently doing for our localization community, Pascal has been hard at work on improving Mozilla’s web l10n dashboard.  Here is a summary of his changes:

    Communication improvements

    • Placed a highly visible subscription link to the RSS feed so updates to relevant bugs are seen immediately by localizers
    • Began sorting feeds chronologically with better description of tasks
    • Fixed a bug on feed page so that the feed now leads directly to a locale’s page
    • Added “last update of data” information on pages
    • Improved the readability with CSS and template changes

    Organization of locales

    • Added the metalocale ‘es’ Spanish for tracking of projects shared by all Spanish-speaking teams (mostly marketing sites and support)
    • Added the locales es-CL, ms, or, rm, ta-LK

    Projects views

    • Added support for a bug to belong to multiple projects in tracking sections
    • Added new subsections for Firefox 3.5 release for tracking
      • Projects and sections can be added/removed editing a config file, useful for short term projects like mini-sites

    New tool  

    • main.lang checker, which I blogged about in the past
    • Warns the localizer of UI strings missing or identical to en-GB (as the reference locale) on mozilla.com/mozilla europe/mozilla messaging
    • Added main.lang checker data to the web dashboard
      • if main.lang files are out of date, it is displayed in the rss feed and the web dashboard page

    Other

  • 70 locales

    March 13th, 2009 by seth bindernagel with 3 comments »

    It’s been a busy week for the l10n team.  Has anyone else been following the l10n release tracking bugs for Firefox 3.5?  Take a look at this dependency tree from Bugzilla showing 79 open bugs for potential locales.  That’s a rough list of the upcoming locales for Firefox 3.5.  Please keep in mind that this does not mean that we will add all these langauges for the upcoming release.  But, I will say that we will add *some* number of those listed.  In fact, just this past week, Axel added the following localizations (language, primary region, locale code) to the l10n dashboard:

    1. Bengali, Bangladesh, bn-BD
    2. Oriya, India, or
    3. Spanish, Mexico, es-MX
    4. Croatian, Croatia, hr

    If the locale is building on the dashboard, it means Mozilla’s build and release team is now officially generating localized versions of that language.  It doesn’t mean they are usable versions, but localizers work on translations until their builds are green.  If you looked at that l10n dashboard link from above and click on ff31x in the “Tree” section , then you’ll see that we are now building 70 versions of Firefox!

    It’s likely that we will also a new version of English for South Africa, Kazakh, a version of Tamil for Sri Lanka, and Assamese at some point during Firefox 3.5.  Finally, we are doing active outreach and support to Swahili, Malay, and Azerbaijani.  This happens primarily because of the drive and passion of individuals who are eager to translate into their native language (they’re listed above in that bug tree).  But, it’s also due to some specific community folks:

    • Axel Hecht
    • Pascal Chevrel
    • Staś Małolepszy
    • Zbigniew Braniecki
    • Gervase Markham
    • The Release Engineering team

    Now, to reel in the celebration a bit, it’s easy to get excited by these numbers, but we put in serious effort to make sure we can scale…and we’re starting to feel the pressure.  Managing 70 locales across three platforms is not an easy task.  Look for more blog posts from me on what we are doing to sustain this pace.

  • Hierarchical facets

    March 5th, 2009 by seth bindernagel with 4 comments »

    Axel gave me a nice lesson yesterday about hierarchical facets, something I didn’t really know much about. (Or, if I did, didn’t know it had a name.)

    He envisions hierarchical facets as a way to display the shipping information for our locales and I want to see his sketch of that.

    I began to think that we might use this technique to organize the information on Mozilla’s localization dashboard more effectively.

    Axel passed me this example, which I really liked.  I began daydreaming of something like this as a way to display the content on our dashboard.

    Where I see…

    …the “subject” section in this example, we could present “product” or “localization”…

    …the “format” section, our dashboard would display whatever we didn’t choose in the “subject” section…

    …opportunities for new sections (not seen in the example), we could display open bugs that could link to Pascal’s web-parts dashboard page, tracking bugs for finishing a localization, or Stas’s web services bugs.

    …a real chance to daydream, we might display a fourth section showing remaining untranslated strings in a locale.

    What other sections could we add?