Mr Firefox, I presume

It is in a way funny, how long it has taken me to face this question. It is rather simple. The foxes need two genders to survive, procreate and flurish - and this applies to Firefoxes too. Our Firefox, is it a male or a female?

For French (le renard), German (der Fuchs), Spanish (el Zorro) is a male. On the other hand for Italians (la volpe), Portuguese (la raposa - not sure) and Slavic languages (e.g. Russian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian and my mother language Slovenian) fox is lisica, i.e. it is neither it, nor he. It is a she, i.e. female.

So there's a non.negligible group of languages where the gender difference is still present and where the female alternative (for a change) prevails and where foxes, Firefox included, are ... ladies.

Here's now the text I had to localize for Firefox flicks:

You're impossibly fast and strong. Your fur is soft and warm... and bright orange.Your eyes are kind and you're always thinking of others.You're never closed and you never compromise.

... and then comes the scene, where the girl says to the man off-screen - and I kept typing -

Please don't make me choose. Because it'll be her.

Oops, the English source says him! I quickly corrected "her" to "him" in the translation and then said to myself: what a nice, surprising gotcha. What a double-entendre... Then I had a laugh, drew a deep breath and repeated: Firefox is a man, is a man, is a man. Firefox is a man!

In Slovenian, and probably in other Slavic languages, a "he-fox" is "lisjak", so theres a way out of the bind. Except that, at least in my mother language, "lisjak" has a questionable sound to it, like cunning, double-dealing, Artful-Dodgerish.

Remember Josephine in Some like it hot, repeating "I'm a man, I'm a man..."? Pretty similar situation: Firefox is a man, is a man, (sigh) is a man!

But then, nobody is perfect.

You're telling me you do L10n? Show me your commits

The reason for this blog is the following table from a corner in the Mozilla land. The name, email etc columns are uninteresting. Have a look, however, at the Role column: just one person out of 28 has not   raised his hand for translation and localization. Means that more or less everybody in the list is an active localizer?

The localization at Mozilla can mean different things:

 

Looking just at the commits for Mozilla aurora versions and into the verbatim statistics gives us a  picture, that's radically different from 27 out of 28 above. Only 8 persons out of 28 are active committers. A similar situation in Verbatim: a very lenient selection criterium  (5% and more of the work done) eliminates 17  entries from the list of 28.

One must conclude that the entry "l10n" in the role column does not necessarily mean active involvement. The best one can hope is that it means a raised hand. In the busses,bringing the pilots to their planes during the Korea war, the following rule was enforced: standing-room-only for anybody, who had yet to shoot down an enemy plane.There's been a lot of people standing around in our bus. Time to give them an opportunity, to challenge them, to take a seat.

Here's some hints on how to check the localization status for your locale:

• L10n product commits: can be deduced from http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/l10n/mozilla-aurora/locale (for instance on  http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/l10n/mozilla-aurora/el for the Greek community).
  
• Verbatim activity: you get the stats for Verbatim activity in a similar fashion from http:/localize.mozilla.org/locale, for instance on the page https://localize.mozilla.org/sl for Slovenian.
  
• SuMo stats:  are a little more complicated to get: you may want to have a look at the status of the site translation  first - translating support articles without localizing the site first does not make much sense. The status of the Support knowledge base and its localization can be deduced from https://support.mozilla.org/locale/localization page (here's the Croatian page).
  
• Mozilla.org: last but not least, the Mozilla web sites. You can start at the top node on locales .

SuMo - a look at locales

The Support for Firefox site is proudly multilingual. 71 languages, from Akan to Zulu can be selected, which is rather close to the number of localized Firefox versions  (85 and counting). What does it take to localize SuMo?

• SuMo Site: The localization runs within the Verbatim enviroment. The size of the job is close to 6000 words in size. 
• Articles: together with the templates used there's about 300 units to be localized. In the OmegaT project, used for the SL locale, the 93 articles translated amount to ~54.000 words. Ballparking one single article then at 600 words, the complete phase space of KB articles must be close to 180.000 (!)  words. To stay within reasonable limit, the top 20 articles should suffice, but that still means about 12.000 words.

The amount of text to be localized to a reasonably complete degree is thus 18.000 words. It does not match the total size of Firefox localization (ca. 180.000 words),  however, these additional 10% however can make quite a difference. Think of a Firefox user with a problem: when an English version of the help pops up on pressing F1,  the fun is gone for all non-speakers of English.

Looking at the status

Every language, recognized by SuMo, has a dashboard, showing the current status of the localization - for instance for Slovenian language (a little plugging for one's own cause does not hurt;). There one can see, how many of the top 20 articles and so-called templates are up-to-date in the selected locale and how it stands with the localization of the SuMo site itself.  Current status for SL is all green (top 20 articles and templates localized). 23% of all the articles has been localized and as regards the SuMo site itself,  it is fully localized in SL (evident from the Verbatim dashboard for SL ).

That much about SL - what about the other 70 languages? The data for the diagram below have been collected from the Dashboard pages:



The diagram shows the number of localized articles and templates versa the number of localized top 20 articles. The four clusters (from left to right) can be identified as follows:

• the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak:  this is by far the largest group with 71 language groups present. They are at the beginning of the SuMo journey. 23 of the languages in this group  have not one single text unit translated. This is one third of all the languages advertized in the drop down list box. Altogether 37 languages (i.e. a good half of the whole portfolio) are in this group. One could just as well tag it as "Huh!?" group.
• moving up: there's three languages on the move from the start-up group to higher grounds. we wish them all the best on the way.
• room at the top : eight locales have it made (the top group around 250 articles+templates and top 20 from 15 on). Let us mention them by their names: Dutch, Japanese, Polish, Italian, French, Spanish - Castillian, German, Chinese (PRC)
• let's be practical: the two languages with top 20 in green, but with a significantly lower number of translated articles (bottom right), are Czech and Slovenian. I can not speak for CZ, but in the SL case it is a question of diminishing returns. Practical example: for SL there was one single Helpfulness vote the last 6 months for #20 - Importing favourites and other data from Internet Explorer.

...Two months later

The four (or three and a half) groups above can be identified elsewhere as well - for instance in the  the completness of  product localizations as well as their portfolio. The locales in the "room at the top" group are no surprise. What may be surprising at first glance, is their absence from SuMo fori (with the laudable exception of FR), but just at the first glance: they have adressed the question of support some time ago with the help of their own fori etc. I have yet to find out how they make the localized material in Knowledge Base to their language group - I assume they do, but have bo proof for the assumption.

PS: this is just some of the facts I have culled from the Verbatim site. See also Thar she blows ...

Shift from 3.6 to 8.0 - looks like it works

The weekly Report for SL for the week 2011-12-11 states:




The biggest changes is in 7.0  (-30,6%) and in 3.6 (-13%).  While the drift 7.0>8.0 has been around for some time and thus expected, the drop in 3.6 (amounting to 17,10% with 3.5 thrown in) could well be a result of "gentle prodding", activated lately, with users of those versions getting a note about upgrading.  The increase in 8.0  - in spite of the overall drop of 3% - supports this gut feeling.

How can you improve the average quality of spoken English?

Simple: stop trying and give Anglosaxons a chance at your own mother language.

from Süddeutsche Zeitung Nr. 263/ p 11:Audienzgerecht
Would anybody come to Germany to get exposed to bad English?
German as language for sciences ? A tricky question.

[quote]

In Lessing's "Minna von Barnhelm"  the baffled Frenchman de Riccaut la Marliniere asks: "Vous speakez pas French, Madame? " and the heroïne gives him a straightforward, common sense answer: "Sir, I would give it a try in France." This proud modesty in relation to our own mother language is missing everywhere in this country.

A New Zealander of Chinese Origin, living in Germany for years, complained, that she hardly gets a chance to speak German:  even the clerk at the post office counter will grab the opportunity to practice his English on her.This is rather rude from Germans, even when meant as a polite gesture. A participant in the discusssion brought it to the point: do we seriously expect foreign students will come  to Germany to  listen to lectures in bad English?...

[/quote]

Thar She Blows - Quantitative Look at the Localize.Mozilla.org site

Introduction

Note: this is a draft version of the article and will be changed resp. expanded in the future. stay in touch;) The intention of this communication is look into the rear-view mirror, presented at this site and learn about how we get the work done.  

A number of localization projects - for instance the SuMo, AddOns, MDN  to name the biggest - is running via Localize/Verbatim site:

Here's the basic statistics of the work in progress:

• active projects:  13
• languages involved: 85
• number of active l10n projects:  335

The data, discussed and analyzed, have been culled from this site. I appologize in advance for possible inconsistencies. Note also this site is alive and kicking and has been changing all the time.Still I do not think they would change the results and the over-all impression presented here.

About projects

Here's the diagram of running projects (sorted by percent finished):

 

Fig 1: Degree of completion - overall in %

The bars above are all scaled to the same total size of 100% on the web site. Using a different metrics, i.e. the number of words involved,  the situation looks quite different:

                                           Fig 2: Degree of completion - overall in words

This is a much more relevant point of view - after all we localize words and not percents. Note that Addons Mozilla (325k) and Support Mozilla (190k)  together have the amount of red twice the size of green in the rest of the projects.

For every project and language involved the date and time of last access is also recorded. Below the amount of unfinished work in words vs date of last access:

Fig 3: Amount of unfinished work vs date of last access

For 41% of the unfinished business the date of the last access is unknown. However, given the level of "unfinished" for these records one can safely assume they have never been really active. The following diagram shows the average levels of project completion  for the four date/time slots:

Fig 4: Percent unfinished vs date of last access

The "unknown" slot (leftmost column) could indeed be named "never". Quite a different story the other three time slots:  they paint a much greener picture. The rising trend shows the site is alive: fresh new projects turn up to be localized, while older projects may be getting a fresh layer of paint.

About languages

The above analysis gives an overall picture. What can we say about different languages and their record? The analysis below is based on the following data for each language

• the number of ongoing projects
• the total number of words in the portfolio
• the average completion level

Alltogether 335 records for 85 languages (Aafrikans - White Russian)  X  12 projects (Addons - Webify me)  have been clustered using Ward's method:

Fig 4: dendrogram of active languages 

There's clearly at least four clusters present, so the decision was to ask for 6 clusters, which turned out to be a pretty good guess. Based on their average properties, the six clusters were named as follows:

cluster	# languages
Window shoppers	32
Tyre kickers	11
The cautious	7
VTOLs	12
Working class heroes	15
The awesome	8

Let us have a closer look at the suggested clusters:

• Window shoppers: completion level  ~ 1%, number of project 1-2, of small sizes. The favourite project in this group is Bugzilla Component Descriptions with 121 words to be translated.
• Tyre kickers: they have on average 4-5 projects, completed 25% on average, and working on a portfolio half the possible maximum size.
• The cautious: one would be tempted to include them in the window shoppers' group (1-2 small size projects), but their average completion level is at respectable 94%. One can expect they will come back for more.
• VTOLS: they have 3-4 projects of ~20% of the total, with the completion level close to 50%. They are taking off.
• Working class heroes: a group with distinctly higher number of projects (6-7) , average portfolio size above 50% and an attractive average completion level of ~70%.
• The awesome: they have ~10 projects active, amounting to close to 90% of the total portfolio, with the average competion level of 92%.

Note: for the curious, who would want to know, which cluster their language falls into:

• check the number of active projects for your language
• check their total size, expressed as percent of the total portfolio size (57313)
• check you over-all competion level
• consult the description above

The difference between clusters goes deeper and it involves the internal workings of a given localization group and its mode of operation. More on that later.

Who done it!? - about language teams

The analysis in this section is based on on-line activity log, available for every language (example SL - AMO project):

Fig 5:example of the on-line activity log

 
The totals for the language group can serve as an indicator for the on-line activity of the language group respectively the individual.  Note that verbatim site serves also as a VCS gate and the batch-mode activity of translators is not recorded here - as we will see, this can be gauged only indirectly.

Fig 6: average on-line activity (left) and number of projects (right) for the clusters

The top two clusters have significantly higher on-line activity, both in terms of events (left) as well as in the number of projects, active on-line.

Behind all these numbers are people - altogether ~460 participants. Let us assume there's two projects running for the XY language, with Alice doing the majority of the work for project #1 and Bob  for project #2. Their share of work is for instance 80-20 for Alice, and 30-70 for Bob. The maximum score (80% in this case, or rather 100-80 = 20%) is a measure of collaboration within the language group and is shown below for the language clusters:

Fig 7: cooperativity level within the language clusters

In case of the four clusters on the left it does not make much sense to talk about cooperativity, due to the number of projects involved (1 or 2, maximum 4 for tyre kickers). The two clusters on the right hand side indicate however a growing level of cooperation, accompanied by the specialization and spreading of tasks.

Verbatim is just a part of the Mozilla l10n landscape!


Here's an off-the-cuff summary of the localizeable materrial within Mozilla:

Fig 8: Mozilla l10n segmentation

The material discussed in this article is about a quarter of the total task. It is also second to the product localization. This all can mean different things to different people / clusters:

• Window shoppers: they are for sure involved with the product localizaction, at least with localizing Firefox. Their level of completion can not be much different there.
• Tyre kickers: ditto, possibly first kicking visits ton TB and SuMo support articles
• The cautious: they may branch out - or may have already done so
• VTOLS: make come unexpectedly at the top some time soon
• Working class heroes: trying to do all of it with a mixed level of success
• The awesome: doing it all and succeeding, but teething pains

The immediate problem, facing anybody branching out of any given segment in the Fig 8, is the change of the working environment:

segment	repository env.	file types
Mozilla SL - aurora	HG	Dtd, Properties
Verbatim	CVS (verbatim)	Po
SuMo articles	Django online	UTF8 + syntax
Web contents	SVN	Html

The localizer, whose qualification should above all be of a lingustic nature, should thus also be a wizzard in all kinds of incompatible environments. There's not many of such kind in any locale, and below some critical language size I am afraid there's none. Of course tyre kicking and window shopping does not require that much speciation...

Conclusions

Every one of the described language group types has its own specific immediate problems, with the common one of "too much work and not enough time and manpower. Here's my personal suggestions

Window shoppers, tyre kickers

It is easy to make a commitment, but the road gets more and more slippery with the time spent on the job. They should focus on short projects - even if slightly ridiculous, Bugzilla Component Descriptions is perfect project to kick off, with Mozillians and Affiliates next on the list. There should be more of projects like this.

The cautious, VTOLs

I am sure that at least the cautious will not jump right into - say - Mozilla AddOns. Some guidelines on what gives a localizers more bang for their bucks would be welcome. Support articles are a good example for that: the number of articles is humungous by now, but doint the first 10 or 20 covers a lot of ground. Unfortunately this is not so in some other cases - see  Fx, TB, Amo; MDN projects.

Working class heroes

They should look for fresh members in the l10n team and for productivity tools. Way to higher levels in any case involves building a team and division of tasks, plus a high level of cooperativity among the members of the team. "Owning" some project is a sure way down into home-made problems.

The awesome

The localizers need to hear their story. And Mozilla should listen closely when they raise their hand.

Open-Source-Software for translators

by Alexandra Kleijn - originally published in Heise C't Open source

The world of translators is a Windows world: MS Word, and the translation tool SDL Trados are the measure of things. Whoever prefers a different operating system or does not want to bow to the dictates of SDL, has so far had a hard time. But now alternative tools are available - even for Mac and Linux users. And they are in part Open Source.  

Hardly any professional group is as loyal to Microsoft as translators. Not surprising when you consider that their clients provide basic texts in many cases still in the well-known doc format -. The migration to Office 2007 and the still relatively new 2010 - and on XML-based, open file formats - is taking place only slowly.

With the open source office suite OpenOffice, however,  a free alternative to MS Office is available, which is hardly inferior to its competition in terms of its functionality. A major advantage of the open-source suite is the fact that it runs equally well on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. OpenOffice as an independent office software is a good alternative for a number of users as well.

OpenOffice is open source: the application is available together with its source code and anyone who feels called upon can change the application according to his own ideas. Open-source software may also be in general distributed without any restrictions.  Even if the developer of an open source program is free to ask for a license fee for his application, open-source software is usually free of licensing costs. Open source software is generally based on open standards and data exchange between different programs is easy.

Document formats: MS Word reigns
OpenOffice Writer, the word processing application in OpenOffice, can handle the well-known Doc format, used in  Microsoft  2003 and its earlier versions is. The problem, however, are MS-Office documents with macros, many embedded images and forms. Even with complex formatting, such as a division of the text in columns, must often be handled manually.

It does not look so good for the exchange of documents using the new Microsoft's XML-based Office Open XML format (OOXML), the default file format for MS Office 2007 and 2010 (file extension. Docx). The original format is often lost when opening docx files in OpenOffice. The way back  is (still) blocked: Documents can't be saved as docx in OpenOffice Writer does not save as docx, at least not under Windows and the Mac - the Linux version of OpenOffice offers this possibility.  This rather limits the  usefulness of OpenOffice as a MS-Office replacement for translators: the docx file received from the client for translation, must be returned  in the old DOC format or in the ODF format, available in OpenOffice.

 ODF, a standard format  for text documents, approved by ISO, can be opened directly in Word 2007 with Service Pack 2 and in Word 2010. In older MS Office versions one can upgrade to ODF support using the Sun ODF Plug-in. The new owner Oracle will ask for money, but one can still download the plug-in from  Softpedia free of charge. The plug-in knows the functions of the new ODF specification 1.2, Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010 only support ODF 1.1. Mac users are left with nothing: Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 and 2011 do not recognize the ODF format.

  

LibreOffice saves in docx format as well

Since autumn 2010, the OpenOffice offshoot LibreOffice has been courting the attention of users. This so-called fork was created after the Oracle's takeover of the Sun, lead developer of the open source office suite. The current LibreOffice 3.3, based on the same source code as OpenOffice 3.3,  can open as well save docx files. It is plagued, however, by the same formatting problems applies  OpenOffice.
For Mac users Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 is available since last October. The new version has move closer to the Windows version. It also finally supports Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), so that Office macros should  work across platforms.

Translation Tool Translation Memory
For many  translators a Translation Memory System is indispensable. In the market for TM environments one can meet a lot of providers. In the last few years the Top Dog SDL, the manufacturer of the TMS Trados, has gotten quite some competition breathing down its neck. In Germany, for example,  Across and MemoQ. All these tools are, however, proprietary software. After all, cross-platform TM tools such as Wordfast Pro and Swordfish have broken Microsoft's hegemony somewhat. They are written in Java and run also under Mac OS X and Linux. 

Few years ago everybody was cooking his own little dish, with all the resulting compatibility issues. The latest trend goes increasingly toward open standards: XLIFF (XML Localization Interchange File Format) for document exchange and TMX (Translation Memory Exchange) for translation memories. Both are based on XML. The eXtensible Markup Language separates the content and the other information such as formatting and meta tags, and has established itself as a standard for cross-platform and cross-program data exchange of all kinds. The situation is by no means optimal: many manufacturers push their own interpretations of these standards - so for many, the "dirty" Bilingual Word document remains the measure of things.

OmegaT 

OmegaT - OpenSource TM-based translation tool
for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux

At the moment the only open source TM tool, ready for the production use, is OmegaT.  It is written in Java  and can work directly on Microsoft's OOXML texts. Documents, created in earlier versions of Office documents , must first be converted either with MS Office 2007/2010/2011 (Mac) or to open office before they can be translated. When converting to OpenOffice, the previously mentioned risk still exists, namely that expensive-looking documents do not survive the transition without any formatting changes.

The project openTM2 has yet to grow beyond the beta stage. The focus here is the open-source implementation of a TM oldie: the IBM Translation Manager. The lofty goal of openTM2 has been to become the reference platform for the translation memory exchange standard TMX. The trial version currently available runs only on Windows. 

...to be continued ... 1/2                  

Translation: smo