I want to start the way it's saying that I was not supposed to be doing this talk, we were
supposed to be having Anna here from the accessibility team, which is an awesome team at
Mozilla, but unfortunately her visa got rejected.
So big boo for whoever rejected her visa.
So then I took the time to come here to talk all of you about something else.
I came from the middle of nowhere where I lived to the beautiful Brussels and can't wait
to give this great talk to you.
All right, let's move on and see what are we actually going to be talking about.
Quick intro about localization, what are we actually doing to localize how to read
Mozilla, then Mozilla language portal, that's something new, that's going to be the main
the core part of this talk, then a little bit about bird box questions and then we go home.
So it's really hard to say in just a few words what localization is and how we do it at
Mozilla.
So I thought I'd ask someone very intelligent and the answer that came up was very poetic
and I decided to dig in a little bit, like what do you actually mean by that?
And then the famous poet from the East actually clarified it.
And I think it's a pretty good statement.
The whole point of localization is to bring the open web to way more people than if we don't
do localization and we can prove that with numbers, there are way more Firefox users
that use translate at localize versions of Firefox than English Firefox.
So localization matters.
And for a brief moment, let's dive into some stats.
We don't only localize Firefox, at Mozilla, there's a bunch of projects going on.
You've heard about many of them today and there's a bunch of others more.
Usually in pontoon, in our platform, to localize, you're going to see around 30 projects
that are being worked on, sometimes the number is a little bit higher, sometimes a little
bit lower.
We have a total of 365 and a half double check, that number, 365 teams.
So locales, the which we translate over, locales a little bit different than a language
because we have several regional variants of some languages like Spanish.
We have a separate localization of Mexican Spanish, Spanish, Spanish, and so forth.
But 369 locales, it's a pretty huge number.
I don't know if there's a lot of software or even out of software industry projects that
have so many translations or like book translations or whatever.
We have about 1,000 plus volunteers who in their free time make sure that Firefox Thunder
Bird, AMO, MDN, Sumo is available for speakers of their language.
They're awesome and I'm happy that I see some of them here and I'm happy that some
of us are following us as I just read from chat.
Hi.
To give you an idea of the amounts, we're talking about a half a million translations
submitted per year.
The numbers, of course, varies a little bit year by year, but just to give you an idea.
And a translation, a strength could be something very simple, even like one letter,
but it would also be like a whole paragraph.
Sadly, I don't have a number to give you the exact words.
Okay, so what is the language portal?
It's something that doesn't exist yet.
Actually, I'm looking at you in Ludo.
For those of you who didn't come to the contributor to meet up yesterday, I think it was
you or Pascal who said something about that, we should be doing more things in the open
to get the feedback, that's what we're trying to do here.
We're in a very early stage of developing the Mozilla language portal, and it's a simple
micro-absite, targeted at localization and translation experts globally from various industries
various projects.
And the basic idea is to share stuff that we do at Mozilla, our translations, or best
practices, even tools with them, and make them available for their use.
For example, I know that some of you are probably not familiar with the term translation
memory.
We'll basically collect all the translations that have ever ended up in any project that
we translate, either today, either in the past, it's been like a project that doesn't exist
anymore, and we store them.
And that the base is called translation memory, and it's useful to Chrome localizers,
open office localizers, Linux, digital localizers, everyone basically.
And language portal is going to have simple search, which is going to allow people to search
through it, don't lose these translations and incorporate them into their tools, as well
as leverage this content through the API.
Similarly, through the exact same means, we're going to make it available for people to
use our glossary, so collection of terms.
We have a list of terms that are frequently translated and part of translation strings,
with their definitions, examples of use, and all of them are translated to maybe not
360-nile accounts, but to most of them.
That's going to be available similarly as translation memory.
In addition to that, we have a process, the way we do localization, which is not necessarily
specific for a Mozilla, there's no strong reason why some start up or some add-on developer
who wants to have their piece of software localized, wouldn't be able to benefit from that.
So we're going to make the relevant bits of our documentation available to people.
We have a block on which we not only write about stuff that's going on at Mozilla, but it's
potentially interesting for the wider industry, so we're going to make this thing available
on the language portal as well.
I also have style guys, which will probably come in the later states, not in the initial
version of the language portal, but basically documents through which localization teams
define the standards and rules under which they localize.
We also have some language technology that we develop in-house. I've already mentioned
pontoon, which is our TMS system, but the one that I want to highlight, I know that this URL
is probably not very visible, and I didn't put a cure coat on.
That's still half done, right?
Yeah. The Moz Outen and Library is, I think, something that has a potential to become an
industry's leading library to parse and serialize virtually anti-translation format into a
data model that is mimicking the new standard message format too, you might have heard of,
and as such, allows a very rich representation of virtually anti-massage stored in any
format. This is actively worked on, we're going to be adding other features, checks soon,
and I'm pretty sure there's a potential for lots of users for that.
This is just a sneak peak of how the home page is going to look like or might look like,
there's another URL you don't see at the bottom where this is being developed.
Feel free to provide suggestions, file box, when we're so far that you can actually find bugs,
as well as provide patches. You accept those as well.
And now that I'm at the very end, I just want to co-out bird box, which is the framework
that we use for building, a Mozilla language portal. It's a framework developed by our
Moz Miao team, Mozilla Marketing and Operations, I think, is what the acronym stands for,
specifically Steve Jalim, who allowed me to mention his name on stage. Bird box is basically
helping developers to build the microsites like the one that I just discussed.
With Mozilla branding, so it's leveraging Mozilla protocol, the design system used by
Mozilla.org and some other Mozilla assets, and it allows developers to then hand over
content creation to non-developers, because it's built on Vactel CMS,
which basically allows anyone who can use Facebook to also add it to these websites.
All right, that's it for me. Thank you so much. Thank you very much.
Do we have questions, etc.
Will the speed almost like crowd in? Do I see like a crowd in copy coming up from Mozilla?
No, the language portal is not going to be like a crowd in, but we already have a similar
tool like crowd in, called pontoon. It's available on pontoon.mozilla.org. That's where
translations come in. That's where people see a set of projects that will localize, they can
enjoy their teams, they see the string, they can actually translate strings. So that's sort of like
our translation management system. It's specifically targeted at people that are translating
Mozilla software. Mozilla language portal contains lots of or most of the translations or all
of the translations that are submitted through pontoon, but makes them available in a more
let's say user-friendly fashion. Then if you go directly into pontoon and try to find
where to download some of these files that you can't really download them in the right form,
you can't really search through them through pontoon. So it's basically repackaging that content
and making it available separately to everybody, not just to Mozilla localizers.
More questions?
Thank you. Sorry, I, I, I, I, it's very simple question. Did you say that the main
audience of this part is going to be developers or who else? I didn't catch it.
The main audience of Mozilla language portal are going to be localization professionals,
translators, from any project, from any, um, software projects they localize.
So they, they lean into this to localizers, open office localizers, Mozilla localizers,
Microsoft localizers, uh, translators that may be not even translators, um,
software. Maybe they would find some of the terms, uh, that we translate useful in translation
of whatever they translate. So it's targeting translators. Uh, the part where I might have confused
you, uh, was the documentation, the best practices. So if you want to, if you have a project
that you would like to get localized, then yes, we're basically also targeting developers with
the documentation of processes, best practices, how to write the code such that it's
localizable. We have these documents available today, but they're a little bit harder to find,
and we think that if we put them on this, uh, hopefully more visible, uh, place, uh, more people are
actually going to benefit from them. Do I have more questions? I have a question. Um,
today, if I want to translate something, I can use a RIGI to do the translation, um,
how, what's the value proposition that is different than me just using a RIGI to do my
translation, because I'm just too busy to do the work, right? Um, it's the quality basically.
Um, at least, at least today, it's very, very, okay. The quality is, and a very fine answer.
Okay. At least for me. No, for me something, some, I, I contribute a bit in the past.
For me, the most important thing is that we're not translating, we're localizing. So some
of the AI will translate, word by word, or the sentence, we're in the culture that's why you have
different versions like different locales, and we don't have just only languages, because we
look alike, something to your local culture, expedience, or things like this.
Yeah, so I have a similar question. Um, there's this trend of using machine translations
for everything in software these days, and obviously the data set that Mozilla is intending to publish
through the language portal will be of much higher quality, but how can you, let's say, um,
motivate users to use the language portal instead of machine translations.
Right. Um, that's a fair question. We're, um, we're already, um, giving the ability to localizers
to opt in, um, to what we call a pre-translation, which means that when new strings are made
available, they already see them as translated. They're marked as still meaning work, but they
actually end up in the product, if we don't act, if they don't act upon them in real time. And the
way that works is it's basically using machine translation that's trained with our existing data,
which is going to be available on Mozilla language portal. Some localizers don't like that.
They say, and we trust them, that it doesn't work for the local. There's 369 locales.
I doubt that the quality is the same for all the languages. I know that for mine, for Slovenian,
which is spoken by two million people, it's unbelievably good. I know that there's, there's not
so much material available in my language probably, um, but, um, but it's way better, uh, than,
than going to generic machine translation engine. So, uh, I think these questions, the answers
to the question that Ludo asked might have a different answer in a different point in time in the future.
There's a question in the chat. Is there any LLM use case involved in any part of the work flow?
Also, where can I learn more about this? I'm, I'm not sure I got the question. Learn more
of more about the language portal. The, uh, in LLM use case involved in any parts of the work flow?
Okay. And where can this person learn more on this? Okay. So, I think one part is what I explained
in my answer to the previous question, uh, but maybe the user is hinting at using that,
using these translations also to train these engines, but the answer to that is that I think,
even though the numbers look high, uh, and I know AI experts, but I think in terms of training material,
these are really, really low numbers. Like, is there any AI involved? No, he says, in building that,
no. I'm not sure I answered that question. Was that? Yeah, he's hiding. Other more questions?
Thank you very much for attending the material room. We're going to clean up and close.
Stickers are only available downstairs now. Okay, thank you. No more upstairs. Thank you very much.