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!

From now on a valid language code may be used instead of ‘selected’ and ‘all’.
If the language code is invalid or there is no translation available, an error message appears.

Example: http://www.babelzilla.org/wts/download/locale/de/skipped/5136

This will download the “de” (German)  locale and skip all missing strings.

You can now use this default URL:

http://www.babelzilla.org/wts/download/locale/

The download requires 3 parameters:

The first parameter: Type of the download. You can download all or the selected locales

Allowed values:

• selected
• all

The second parameter: Handling of untranslated strings

Allowed values:

• replaced
• skipped
• blank

Last but not least, third parameter is:

• The id of the extension

as set by the WTS on submission

Example:

http://www.babelzilla.org/wts/download/locale/all/skipped/5136

Enjoy!

Please tell us if you find it useful and if you need more things of this kind.

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

In the near future there will be some changes in the edit interface of the WTS.
It’s not ready yet, but almost ready to use.

I want to take the chance to introduce the new features even if there are some things to fix before it goes online, because I need your feedback and suggestions.

The first thing to come is the new search:
You can now use  Transvision (see here and here)
The result will look like this:

You can see some little icons below the string to translate :

Spellcheck. I don’t think that it needs an explanation. The Google Spellcheck API is used.

Fixing a typo with spellchecker suggestions

Clear the translation.

Copy the original string into the textarea.

Perform some additional checks (e.g. punctuation, missing variables).

You will see something like this:

We’re working on a solution to perform this checks when you leave the textarea, so this image may be removed.

Google translation: The original string will be translated with Google Translate. Maybe it can give you tips if you’re not sure about the translation. We are dedicated to human-made translation, but this could be a good translation help. No less, no more.

A click on the chevron will copy it into the translation.

- What are “blank” and “untranslated for?

- Well, the WTS will detect strings that are intentionally left blank or untranslated. In the future you can mark such strings. Unmarked strings will be deleted, if the developer updates the extension.

Will there be more changes?

Yes.
Developers will have more control over the locales.

• They will be able to delete locales without an active translator.
• They will be able to “open translation” with a new feature, already available for translators. It allows every member to  join the translation team.

* At this point I have a request to all translators: If you can not complete a translation (for whatever reason) please open your translation to other members.
Because the development of the WTS depends on your mind: Please comment

Dear translators and extension developers, we are glad to give you back access to BabelZilla services and want to apologize for the terribly long downtime.  Reason is: our server was hit by a DoS attack and unfortunately also used to attack other servers. Our provider reacted very fast and stopped all traffic from and to our main IP. During the next days we tried to find the hole and checked the server logs. We found the attack in the logs and removed the vulnerable script. (No, it was not the WTS )
To be on the safe side, we decided to set up the server from scratch.
Currently we still have problems with tar.gz files. The created files are OK, but the downloaded files are corrupt.

Our Tech Admin tried his best to restore everything as soon as possible,  so BabelZilla is available again. You are welcome to use it again, please let us know if some unusual behavior occurs when using the WTS — I mean anything else than the usual familiar limitations
Sorry again for this major failure and thank you for your patience.

We are glad to announce a recently added feature that will make translating on our Web Translation System an even better experience: now the comments are not trimmed any longer on editing, you cannot miss tem, they are yellow-highlighted as can be seen in these screenshots, both in .DTD and .properties files. Courtesy of our Tech Admin, who, additionaly, added the < em : localized > tags support when parsing the install.rdf.
Thanks Jürgen!