SUMO Blog

One of the change we are making the knowledge base for Firefox 3.1 is taking the large Options window article and splitting it up into several articles (one article per panel). There are some complications in doing this; and I blogged about our need for Firefox Support locale leaders to translate a text file for us.

Out of 20 languages, we’ve received 14 translations. If you are a locale leader who has not sent me a translation of this text file please translate it and send it to me! Once this restructuring of content is done, we can get on with updating the articles to reflect the changes in Firefox 3.1. For more information on the Firefox Support update plan for Firefox 3.1, the plan is on wiki.mozilla.org.

Last week, I blogged about our plan to split the Options window article, and that we need Firefox Support locale leaders to translate a text file for us.

Thank you to Pavel Cvrček (Czech), Cláudio Esperança (Iberian Portuguese), marsf (Japanese), Simone Lando (Italian), Tatjana Jevsikova (Lithuanian), and Wim (Frisian) for sending in their translations. The six of you are awesome!

For those who have not yet translated it, just translate this text file and send it to me. For more information on the plan to split the Options window article, read about it on wiki.mozilla.org.

As we fully embrace the concept of an entire knowledge base acting as the Firefox manual when you click on Firefox Help, there are some structural changes to the help documentation imported from CVS. By far, the biggest and most notable change is in the Options window reference.

The Options window reference is our biggest article. It is already beyond our size limit for screenshots, without screenshots for secondary option windows (e.g. Fonts, Advanced JS, Languages, Warning messages, etc.). The markup is very complicated, because it contains both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3.0 content, and will contain Firefox 3.1 content. Updating it for Firefox 3.1 is hard to do because of the size and complexity of the markup.

For Firefox 3.1, we would like to split up the Options window reference into sub-articles (one article for each panel). The parent article would include a link to each sub-article, along with a description of each panel, which will also appear at the top of each sub-article. Each sub-article should have a link back to the parent article at the bottom.

This wouldn’t be difficult, if it weren’t for one thing: The actual Options window panels in Firefox each have a [Help] button, which links straight to each section of the Options window article. These are called help-topic links. If a translation of the Options window article has not been split into sub-articles when we update the help-topic link URLs, those help-topic links will not work for that locale (They will actually fall back to the English versions). We need to make sure all translations of the parent article are split, before updating help-topic links.

In order to lessen the workload on localizers, we evaluated how much of this plan we can do ourselves. Basically, what we need is the new text translated. The actual implementation can be done by us. I’ve created a text file, containing all the text that needs to be translated.
Firefox Support locale leaders should translate this text file, and send the translation to me.

If you want to implement it yourself, that would be appreciated; but it should be noted if you are a Firefox product localizer, any work on Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 should be done before this. For more information on the Support changes for Firefox 3.1, details are on wiki.mozilla.org.

Thanks to a tremendous effort by Wil Clouser, it is now possible to localize the SUMO (support.mozilla.com) site UI using Verbatim. For those unfamiliar with Verbatim, it’s an online translator tool for various Mozilla projects, including addons.mozilla.org. It’s designed to be easy to use, encourage help from casual contributors, and provide a clear overview of the translation progress.

The addition of SUMO support means that localizers can use Verbatim to translate the site’s UI rather than using the somewhat clunky built-in interface on SUMO itself. Note that this is strictly for UI localization, not for translating Knowledge Base articles. That’s still done by clicking on the “Translate this page” link on actual articles.

Here’s how the dashboard looks like for SUMO:

Verbatim is still in alpha, but if you want to test this out, please drop by at #verbatim on irc.mozilla.org right now and ping clouserw to get permissions (in Verbatim) to modify SUMO.  The actual translation process is still being worked on, but it’s already possible to start translating strings that will show up on the SUMO website once we import the changes (which will probably happen monthly).

On October 1st, I announced the top 15 Knowledge Base articles for localizers to translate. One week later, all 15 articles were translated into Japanese! Big thanks to Masahiko Imanaka for looking after those article translations. We really appreciate the hard work.

Over the next few days, I’ll be sending out invitations to Firefox Support knowledge base localizers to take a survey. If you receive an invite, do not mistake it for spam. There are multiple goals in the survey, which should help us find out what barriers are preventing people from translating articles, and find out how to eliminate those barriers.

If you’re a translator on support.mozilla.com but not a support.mozilla.com locale leader, contact us by sending an email to djst at mozilla dot com, providing your username so we can send you the survey. Thanks for helping us make the knowledge base better!

Before Firefox 3 was released, we gave localizers a list of Support articles that needed to be translated because they were linked to from within Firefox. But what about after that? If someone wants to get started translating other articles in the Knowledge Base, what are the top articles not linked from within Firefox?

After looking at support.mozilla.com traffic data (since the release of Firefox 3 and all-time), and weighting articles that we feature on the front page, I’ve compiled this list of top 15 articles that should be translated:

1. Installing Firefox
2. Installing Firefox on Windows
3. Installing Firefox on Linux
4. Installing Firefox on Mac
5. Customizing Firefox with add-ons
6. Profiles
7. Hiding bookmarks in the Smart Location Bar
8. Backing up your information
9. Firefox is already running but is not responding
10. Clearing Location bar history
11. Firefox will not start
12. Bookmarks and toolbar buttons not working after upgrading
13. ActiveX
14. Search suggestions
15. How to set the home page

Some localizations of the start page get as much a 50,000 views a month; and localization of the Knowledge Base can be scattered. Those are the most wanted articles for localization, and translating them will have the greatest impact on users finding content in their own language. For instructions on how to translate articles, read our tutorial on translating articles.

If you have any questions, comment here or in the Contributors forum.

After some serious work by the webdev and IT teams, SUMO is finally in a good enough shape to be linked to from Firefox 3! Thanks a lot to Laura, Jeremy, Justin, Mike Morgan, Mark Smith, Nelson, and Jason for all your incredible work on this. What this means is that you are now taken to SUMO in (hopefully) your language when selecting Help from the menu.

Localizers: it would mean the world to us if you could spend a few minutes to make sure the links to your localized product help work properly. Use the link in the Help menu, and open the Options/Preferences window and click Help from there.

Chris and I wrote a document summarizing all that should be done: Updating product help for your locale. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. Don’t forget to localize the start pages if you haven’t done it already! It’s really easy and only takes five minutes.

Thanks!

The SUMO start page and the Firefox 3 product help start page are both ready to be localized. The pages contain very little text, and we estimate this will take less than five minutes to localize.

We’ve written instructions on how to do it in the SUMO Contributor Forum. Please let us know if you have any questions, by commenting here or in the forum thread. Thanks!