I have been lucky enough to be invited to MozCamp Europe in Berlin last week-end and enjoyed the meeting very much on every aspect: have a better insight of what is cooking in Mozilla headquarters, discover amazing projects, having fun together, but above all I am glad I met people in real life and in some cases have an interesting discussion about addons localization on BabelZilla.
First of all, I was very glad to meet our good old Jürgen Berg aka Fenian. It was the first time we met in real life, though we have been working and communicating together on a daily basis for 6 years. I also met for the first time Lakrits who is at the moment our top contributor translating for Swedish, the old-timer teo who is translating for Polish, was pleased to meet again George (aka Sonickydon) from Greece and some others whose face and nick are now familiar to me. I really hope we shall have another occasion to meet other BabelZillians in the future.

Talking about addons localization

A significant number of various sessions were focussing on addons and localization at this MozCamp, which is but justified, considering addons are crucial for the browser, whether they are for old desktop or for mobile which is now major battlefield for Mozilla.
Among various sessions, I attended this very interesting one about the way Jetpacks would be localized in the future. As JSON was a candidate for file format, it seems the community discussion lead to some other localizer-friendly choice. We shall see how our own system can parse this kind of files, but it seems rather easy to handle.
I also gave a short presentation about the current state and issues on BabelZilla and what our goals for next steps are.
You can have slides here. There were a couple of questions and a very grateful Ken Barbalace (the developer of the Classic Compact Options extension), then it was time to leave room for Adofex, (demo) which can be the next step for BabelZilla, replacing gradually our good old WTS. Don’t be afraid, transition will be scheduled smoothly, some key features we currently enjoy on BabelZilla are still to be ported or implemented on Adofex, but hey Tim will develop his already smart tool to be tested and used on BabelZilla, so that you the user community, whether you are newcomers or old-timers, can provide useful feedback and help us create the best possible system together. Also, he would be glad to receive your feedback on the talk and the teams organization.
Tim will soon post here and explain what the interest of Adofex is for Babelzilla and which will be his next step on development. Stay tuned!

Please give a test (it will last less than 2 minutes I promise). This is a beta feature, you can upload as many times as you like since there is no connection to our usual database.

You are welcome to try on this test page.
Test page is no longer available.

A caution though: you will see yourself logged in as ‘BZ_System’. Do not be alarmed and think someone has taken over your account; just log out and log in as yourself again afterwards!

We will be pleased to receive feedback, bug notification, interesting suggestions and requests.

Download here (and no, it is not on AMO)

BTW we also plan to provide 44 restartless versions (one per lang) along with the next release. Restartless is such a cool competitive advantage that we must jump on the bandwagon asap.

Else, you are welcome to use Transvision tool: pick your own language on this page, search for “Add-on Bar”, see how Mozilla l10n team (mmmh some of you are part of it ) has already translated it and change accordingly.

Danish translation for Add-on Bar

And by the way, developers should change labels as well

Bye bye Status Bar!

This time we changed the startpage of the WTS.

The first new thing is the Infocenter.

In the Infocenter you will find your translations that need your attention.

• Updated extensions
  

• Deadline
  If the developer has set a release date for his extension and your translation is not ready yet, it will be included in this list (14 days before the deadline) 

  

• Testing
  Shows all your translations with status “testing/QA” 

  

• Translations “in progress”
   

  

We hope that the Infocenter will provide a better overview of all your translations, especially for the ones that need you attention.

The other tabs are more or less self-explanatory:

• My extensions
  
  
• All extensions
  
• My translations
  

There’s one thing that you should know:

This page is not ready.

We decided to make it available to the public because of the latest problems with WTS.

It may (and we’re sure it will) be changed in the future.

If you think something’s missing or if you you have a suggestion to improve the page please leave a comment here or better post it in the WTS feature request forum

The WTS interface for translators has now been reshaped and handy features are added as announced some weeks ago. It probably needs some finetuning but it is quite usable and we received no major complaints about it up to now.
It is time now to offer our developer friends a couple of new features, some of them being old requests.

• Download selected locales:

When you wish to grab some specific locales, just check and click to download.

• Delete translations:

Unwanted locales, wrong move, wrong language code, starting again from scratch? Just delete.

• Lock translations:

This is intended to avoid problems generated by crowdsourcing translations. Once a stable trusted translation is released, it can be good to keep it safe. It is up to you to decide.

• Remove/add translators:

Sometimes translators are missing in action, sometimes new translators are eager to be registered for an “orphan” locale…
This allows you to choose translators and should be used with care. It is recommended to always keep translators informed about your moves, whenever appropriate.

• Open up locales for other translators to join:

Need more task force in the translation team? Open the translation and the “join the team” button can be clicked by volunteers.

• Check activities on your extension

• Edit metadata of your extension

• Finegrain messages to your translators

As usual you are welcome to test, enjoy and report what could be better

Thanks to Mozilla Labs awesome hackers, we can now enjoy restartless extensions à la Jetpack, and sure this is a cool feature.
One of the most recent extensions of this kind from the Prospector series, is Query Stats. I noticed there are some interface strings bundled in an innerHTML to be found in the bootstrap.js file

Some strings nested in JavaScript code

Now my question is: how are we supposed to localize such an addon?

Is it worth doing it?

Yes, I know: Jetpacks and restartless addons have a very limited number of interface strings or no interface string at all, and Prospector series are mostly experimental, targeting the power user (though I suppose the more mainstream they are, the more useful data they can bring), so i18n may not seem necessary.
I would simply object that restartless addons will probably have a growing success in addons developers community, which is good. But restartless addons with important interface will surface (to me even limited interface is important, but this is another question).

No JavaScript, thanks

Here in BabelZilla we are processing typically .dtd and .properties files, html and xhtml too. But we are definitely not willing to have javascript files uploaded. Moreover we want to lower the entry barrier to translation and we don’t want to ask translators to slalom between javascript functions and variables and translate only strings in code without affecting the syntax.

The right moment?

One little flaw in development makes things more difficult afterwards: localization issues almost always came second as an annoying appendix for real core dev. Localization rises technical issues that should be taken into account right from the beginning of the devlopment process, otherwise it makes things much more complicated (think of the smart and tremendous localization efforts on Ubiquity in the past).

Who can help?

So I would suggest it is due time to think about i18n (hey l20n welcome too!) for this new and promising generation of addons.
Fortunately, and that is why I really love the Mozilla community, there are always brilliant minds who are one step ahead in development and conceive projects that tend to answer questions even before anyone think of asking them

-Please let us know.

Why is there an ad on BabelZilla?

You may have noticed we have recently added two images promoting this addon on the board and on the WTS. This may be quite a surprise for most of our contributors, since up to now we have discarded numerous commercial offers.
Why did we make an exception this time?
For one thing because this is an ad for an extension, so it is closely related to our activity on BabelZilla.
And because the developer of this extension is well-known on our site, having all his extensions being translated by volunteers on BabelZilla.
A little amount of money will be given to BabelZilla for every install. We don’t expect heaps of money to flow down in our pockets. If anything comes out of this experience, we shall probably buy some goodies to promote BabelZilla.
These sponsored links are a test run we can interrupt anytime if there are strong objections. Just tell us.

Our good friend Davide Ficano, a top but too modest developer who also contributed to our site and system (not to mention the awesone Externalize strings extension), recently explained on his blog why he could not afford maintaining numerous locales for his extensions.
Dear Davide, I know the efforts you have been doing for some years in order to maintain as many localizations as possible, so I cannot blame your decision.
Are extension translators lazy?
Not necessarily, but yes, it is very difficult to have them involved on the long term.
Very sad but very true, I fear.

Now the challenge is : what can be done to have a more permanent engagement among the ever so friendly but also so “temporary” translator community
What kind of incentive can be used to have volunteer contributors become so to say permanent allies to the developer and its extensions?
What kind of link or symbolic reward can be used?
We already have an awesome world community with enthusiast and dedicated individuals, but it is a transient community.

We would appreciate very much whatever comes to your mind about this issue. Whether you are a translator, an extension developer or interested in community motivation, please use open comments below. TIA

On July 30th, 2005, when together with early helpful enthousiasts, we (Giuliano, Jürgen, Luana and I) started this project, we just imagined it could be a useful meeting point for extension developers and translators.
We received such a tremendous response from the community of volunteer translators around the world that we were compelled to push our project constantly forward.
There have been about 900 extensions under translation on BabelZilla up to now, for more than 90 languages.
We are very proud to give individuals and teams worldwide the opportunity  to bring their contribution to one competitive advantage of Mozilla apps : extensibility.
Thanks to each and every translator past and present for the time and work spent on the translation game.
We hope you enjoy BabelZilla, we know it is still very far from the perfect site and service we are all dreaming of, but hey we shall try to make it better together with you.
In one of the very early posts on the newborn site you could read

BabelZilla is online, but there is still much work to do.

Well, 5 years later, a lot has been done but we have still much work to do together: develop language team translation, find new translators, fix annoyances and bugs of the WTS, make the interface more user-friendly, find graphic artists contributors, support new extension formats, provide more documentation and guidance…
Join BabelZilla !