Category: l10n
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Why Fluent Matters for Localization
In case you don’t know what Fluent is, it’s a localization system designed and developed by Mozilla to overcome the limitations of the existing localization technologies. If you have been around Mozilla Localization for a while, and you’re wondering what happened to L20n, you can read this explanation about the relation between these two projects.…
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Localizing BBCodeXtra
If you never noticed the menu item in this blog, I’m the developer of a small add-on for Firefox called BBCodeXtra: it’s an extension, started about 10 years ago, that makes posting on forums and other places (e.g. GitHub) a little less painful. This extension, currently at version 0.4.1, is localized in 16 languages: de,…
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Video Subtitles and Localization
Let’s talk about localization and subtitles – not captions. From Wikipedia: “Subtitles” assume the viewer can hear but cannot understand the language or accent, or the speech is not entirely clear, so they only transcribe dialogue and some on-screen text. “Captions” aim to describe to the deaf and hard of hearing all significant audio content—spoken…
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l10n: String Length and Verbosity across Languages
A few months ago I was discussing with @kaze about the truncation plague on Firefox OS, and he came out with a sentence that left me doubtful: according to the desktop metrics I had, French is the least compact locale and Chinese is the most compact one So I had to check it somehow 😉…
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Once upon a time there was a string freeze… pt.2
Since it probably looks like my favorite hobby is whining without a reason, let’s check what happened so far (always an optimist…) in this cycle. Broken strings in Mozilla Beta Bug 797036 – Update updater strings and icon Bug 803344 – poor discoverability of the enable/disable menu item for Social API Landing strings in Beta means that…
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Once upon a time there was a string freeze…
Nine months ago I wrote this post. Are things better now? Not at all, they keep getting worse. When people asked me “how can you be happy with the rapid release cycle?”, I always answered “because finally I have a clear schedule”. Now imagine how I feel about the rapid release cycle. I’m not a…
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l10n Memo for the Next Meeting
My personal short memo for the next meeting, even if I’m sure Axel is already on this: Aurora is supposed to be string frozen, so that localizers have a full cycle to update their localization, test their work and sign-off the best changeset available for Beta. This worked quite well for 5 releases, why did…
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Dear reviewer,
I’m aware that l10n can be a nuisance for a lot of developers – and some localizers (e.g. me) can be a real pain in the *** – but when reviewing a patch that involve a change of existing strings you only have a short and quick checklist to follow: Does the patch fix a…
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Bad Localization Example (Java on OS X)
This is the dialog window that appears when you try to run a Java Applet on Mac OS X 10.5.7 with the last Java update (I’m running Java 1.5.0_19 according to this test). Take a look at the checkbox: In Italian it’s “l’accesso” (definite article+noun), not “laccesso”. The same error appears in the first label,…
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I Hate Accesskeys
As usual, before the final release we’re doing a lot of QA work on our localized Firefox builds, and this includes a careful check on accesskeys. There are two different issues with accesskeys: use of a character not available in the label. For example: using “F” as accesskey for “Shiretoko” creates a label “Shiretoko (F)”.…