Vito's soapbox

Hello, goodbye, ReMo

On the home page for the ReMo project, you can read the following:

The Mozilla Reps program provides a simple framework and specific tools to help volunteer Mozillians become official representatives of Mozilla in their region. Anyone who is passionate and knowledgeable about Mozilla and who is ready to dive deeper into the project can sign-up to the program.

Not wanting to be left behind, I have raised my hand in July 2011 as my wiki page (check History) can attest. I had been active for Mozilla in my own special way anyhow, so the activities within the ReMo program should act as a welcome booster, right? They should bring some order into reporting, provide a feedback via mentor etc?

Unfortunately this is not so: I am opting out. As a decent Mozillian, I decided to follow the corresponding SOP/leaving, where the following alternatives are offered:

I am leaving temporarily: This does not apply, as I am not taking any break, as regards my Mozilla activities.
I am leaving permanently: this is closer, but it gives me no possibility to explain the reasons for my step. Also, somebody else must erase my entry in the Mozilla reps directory - I can not do it myself, even if suggested in SOP.
I am leaving reluctantly: that used to be my feeling for some time before making this step. Right now, however, I am leaving with a good conscience.

The reason would be best described with: I am leaving because of neglect. I am leaving out of respect for my own Mozilla record and standing.

First point: it’s about six months since I enrolled and the persons responsible for the project have yet to realize I am still without a mentor. Not that I would miss her or him - as my reports show, I was pretty active all the time. But then, why mentor in the first place?

Second point: there’s about 240 people on the ReMo members list. Of these 36% have never produced one single report and 16% have done just one. I have written five, then stopped doing them end of October to see the reaction. There was none - my Mozilla activities of course went on unencumbered.

Third point: in the autumn 2011 I applied and was accepted without much fuss in SuMo SIG and for Comm SIG. I had been active in SuMo several yeare before that, while Comm was relatively new to me. I am active in both now. I am still waiting for some sign of life from the ReMo side.

So, summarized, no mentor, no feeback, no SIG.

I will cause no loss to Mozilla by leaving ReMo. However, I will not feel anymore like some zombie record entry - Karteileiche in German.

Sincere regards

smo

September 25

Faster than light?

On 31 May 2010, OPERA researchers announced the observation of a first tau neutrino candidate event in a muon neutrino beam.^[3]

In September 2011, OPERA announced the detection of muon neutrinos traveling faster than light. The announcement was met with skepticism by the physics community (and the OPERA team itself), with other experimental groups planning to attempt to replicate the result, as well as search for any experimental errors which might account for it.^[4]

Watch the webcast New results from OPERA on neutrino properties from sept 23rd.

Comment:

Could the gravity field of Earth and the general relativity be behind the missing 20 or so cm, at the total (Euclidic) distance of 730 km? Geneve is after all at 375 m (take away another 50m to get down below earth to the muon source) and OPERA facility must be at ~900 m or more - Assergi at the west end entry to the Gran Sasso tunnel claims 895m above sea level.

Sort of brachistochronic way out of the bind (g).

September 18

Have you spelchecked your l10n repositry lately?

Introduction

One of the important features of Mozilla products - Firefox, Thundebird, Seamonkey etc - is their high degree of localization. Eighty percent of Firefox users do not have English as their mother language and one of the reasons for its popularity is surely also the existence of versions in the user’s own mother language. The current release of FireFox 6 for instance has been localized into 69 languages, with additional 14, waiting for the last touches by the l10n teams.

The size of the job involving all the products is respectable:

19460 segments (8799 unique)
71648 words (43653 in unique segments)
701 files (DTD and PROPERTIES)
107 sub-directories

… the latest status may differ, but not substantially. Note the amount of repeats - segments like “File Open” turn up several times in the repository.

How make sure that there’s no typos and misspellings in several ten thousand words localized? One may try with the spellchecker in Word or Writer for instance, but then doing that for 700 files, residing in more than 100 different places, is simply prohibitive. Note also, that entries contain not just the payload, but also essential parts that are untranslatable:

(preferences.dtd - first three entries)

  

only the text between quotes has to be translated and spellchecked. Similarly - from browser.properties:

# Add-on Manager addonsLocalNone.label=No add-ons installed addonsSearchStart.label=Searching for add-ons… addonsSearchStart.button=Cancel

Just the text on the right hand side is to be localized, with the left hand side left as is.

It is just a YATT - Yet Another Translation Task

Let’s say you have the work finished, but yet not spellchecked, for the language ab_CD. Think of it as done in ab_CD_raw language and you would need to “translate” into the ab_CD_spellchecked language, with the spell-checker playing the role of the translator. What is needed, is an application that will:

traverse the original ab_CD_raw tree file afterfile
parse the files according to the file format
use the spell checker to check and correct the payload contents
memorize your corrections in the translation memory
create spell checked files, while keeping the tree structure intact

Using OmegaT to do the spell-check

OmegaT is a free translation memory tool, written in Java, intended for professional translators. OmegaT has the following features of interest to Mozilla localizers:

OpenSource for Windows, Linux and OS X
Translation memory based (TMX format)
Document file formats supported include Mozilla DTD, Properties, Key=Value files
Unicode (UTF-8) support: can be used with non-Latin alphabets
Support for right-to-left languages
Integral spelling checker

Visit OmegaT site for more and read through the OmegaT Guide for CAT beginners

How do I…

The procedure in OmegaT is as follows:

Create a new OmegaT project with ab_CD as the source and target language
Copy the source to be spell-checked into the ~/source sub-folder
Check that the spell-checker is activated for the language selected
Select the file formats to be used
Pre-translate the project
Check for spelling mistakes and correct them
When finished, execute function “Create Translated Documents”

The ~/target sub-folder will now contain corrected material.

A typical picture of the OmegaT interface during the step 5 will look like this (For demonstration purposes the locales\en-US tree for aurora release has been used):

Note: the installed spellchecker raises its brows on filesystem and items like toolbar, sidebar, plugin, cancelled… I for one have no problem with it. A real test of the approach was sanitizing the Slovenian repository. While the number of errors found was respectably low, the step was worth taking.

Step-by-step instructions below.

smo 18.09.2011

July 10

BlueGriffon s slovenskim vmesnikom

summary: BlueGriffon, award-winning WYSIWIG web editor, is available also with the Slovenian interface

BlueGriffon je najnovejši WYSIWYG urejevalnik za splet. Pod pokrovom ima Gecko, to je motor Firefox 4 za upodabljanje, to da ima uporabnik BlueGriffona na razpolago sodobno in sodobno orodje za urejanje spletnih strani, ki je skladno z najnovejšimi spletnimi standardi.

Program je brezplačno na razpolago (trenutna stabilna inačica je 1.1.1) za Windows, Mac OS X in za Linux. Vmesnik je na razpolago v14 jezikih, med drugim tudi v slovenščini.

BlueGriffon je intuitivna aplikacija, ki omogoča spletnim avtorjem ( tako začetnikom kot tudi izkušenim) z enostavnim uporabniškim vmesnikom ustvarjati privlačne spletne strani, ne da bi za to bilo potrebno obsežno tehnično znanje o spletnih standardih.

Ker se znotraj BlueGriffona skriva Gecko, bo dokument, ki ga urejate, v Firefox 4 in v kasnejših inačicah brskalnika videti popolnoma enak:

BlueGriffon za slovenskega uporabnika

V Firefoxu si lahko potem napredni uporabniki, če je potrebno, še vedno lahko pomagajo s prikazom izvorne kode, če gre za bolj komplicirane zadeve.

BlueGriffon je na razpolago pod tremi licencami in sicer pod Mozilla Public License 1.1, the GNU General Public License Version 2 in GNU Lesser General Public License Version 2.1.

BlueGriffon, domača stran: http://www.blueGriffon.org

June 23

localize.mozilla.org - some stats

The localizing site https://localize.mozilla.org/ is a pretty busy part of the Mozilla landscape. 19 different web projects are being localized into close to 90 different languages, between Afrikaans and Vietnamese.How well do different languages do? How well do different projects? (I am just copying and pasting the slides I have shown in Sofia.)

+

Mozilla - from a localizer’s point of view

This is a recording of a part of my presentation at the Balkans meeting in Sofia, 5-6 June 2011. In a nut shell: a try at showing how the localization looks from below.

May 27

Balkans Meeting 26.05.2011 - minutes

Instead of an introduction

And the Lord said … let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech (Genesis)

“What we got here, is a failure to communicate” (the sheriff in Cool Hand Luke)

We can do better than that

The Balkans meeting 26th 05 2011 on-line was the last meeting before the Sofia meetup (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Balkans/Events:2011/Sofia). It was thus essential to get everybody updated.

The will was strong, but the flesh was weak: after half an hour of trials the participants (10 and more) were still not able to communicate with each other except via type messages. Worse, they even could not just listen with their microphones muted - as the attached log file can attest.

Half an hour into this Skype bedlam the round gave up and moved to IRC …
but that’s another story, as Moustache from Irma LaDouce would comment.

Here’s my conclusions and suggestions:

Skype is a no-charge service; however, even at no cost it costs us too much in terms of time spent and miscomunication experienced. We need a way of communicating from our locations without any interference and this should be planned and budgeted immediately and executed not later than within 1 quarter.
Some participants had yet to learn how to use IRC. Some had no microphone. A mutually agreed minimum in experience and hardware is needed. Maybe learning to walk is necessary to be able to do ironman sometime down the road. Playing in the Firefox band and not knowing how to communicate via IRC stretches my imagination.

Vito Smolej

For some bitter fun moments read on

May 18

“Be awesome” - says what?

There’s been an undercurrent of discomfort among localizers regarding the expression “awesome”. Cf for instance Matej Novak’s blog at http://matejnovak.com/.

On the etymology of the term “awesome”

The term has been connected to the biblical expression “locus terribilis” already in times of King James. When Elisabeth II talked about “annus terribilis” (the awesome year), she certainly did not mean it the Mozillian way. The Latin phrase “Terribilis est locus iste” stems from Gen 28:17:

He was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place!”

Let’s see the expression as a provocation for localizers, as a test bed to prove their professionalism.

SuMo localizers and the term “awesome”

On the SuMo homepage (https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/home) there’s an invitation to “Be Awesome”. The suggestion - even if somewhat cocky - is pretty straightforward, but what does it say and what does it tell? I have collected all the available localizations to check how well localizers have fared.

Limiting the back-translation of the term to languages (*), I am halfway familiar with, yields the following picture:

Slavic (bs, bg, hr, cs, pl, sl, uk): be phenomenal, amazing, fantastic, huge
Germanic (de, nl, no): be fantastic, great
Romanic (es,ca, fr,it): be amazing, great, fantastic, magnificent

The absence of the original term in back translations should be seen as a warning sign. Any term, used as an attribute for a product, trade mark etc, should exhibit the same distinctiveness, the same level of recognition in all languages used.

This not the case with “awesome”. If back translations carried any weight, fantastic + amazing would be close enough as well as easier to localize. However, I don’t have any illusions.

Conclusion

As regards a lonesome localizer, who’s been fighting with the term: “Well roared, lion”, you have done your best. It is just a hard nut to crack. And as regards the use of the term: apply the homeopathic rule - let us use the expression sparingly and resist the temptation of overuse, especially in materials, intended for international audience

* the complete listing of 32 localizations found can be seen here:

May 14

Mining SuMo weekly metrics

Instead of a introduction

Do not trust any statistics you did not fake yourself (Winston Churchill)
Se non è vero, è ben trovato (it. proverb)

What is SuMo weekly metrics

SuMo weekly metrics is a collection of indicators about

Firefox customers accessing the Support
the problems they are reporting
the reaction to the problems reported
… and the success of the reaction

In a nutshell. it should tell us, what happens, when a customer asks for help.There may be more than that, but it should suffice for the first, starting shot.

By the way, SuMo weekly metrics can be found here:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=piA-a-dXCL2p7vB5pTu0HKA&hl=en#gid=0

“Facts, just facts, ma’am”

The file contains data from different sources, going back to January 2010, i.e. ~60 time points, involving several major releases of Firefox. Time/week points include:

totals (e.g. total active SuMo contributors)
Forum statistics - like…
- Active forum contributors
- “I have this problem” questions votes
- Total helpful / not helpful votes
Questions - …
- with 0 replies
- with helpful answers
- etc…
Active Live Chat - with similar entries
KnowledgeBase activity
Locales Activity

All in all, the spreadsheet is supposed to offer information on 68 indicators (or a certain number less, because some of them resurface as normalized values, for instance questions with 0 replies, once as a total count, and once as a percentage).

The fact is unfortunately that some row data are non-existent and that in the majority of cases single or multiple omissions exist. For instance, rows 9 and 14 (Active Army of Awesome contributors and Avg. forum thread answer time) do not contain any values, and data for Total visitors in real numbers exist only since end of January 2011

______________________________________________________________

Some interesting digs

total visitors

A significant bump-up of traffic, accompanying the Fx4 release, is evident. Note the sheer size of the traffic.

Questions:

Note sudden drop in percentage of replies without useful answers during the phase-in. The increased traffic evidently did not have any hard nuts to crack.

Helpful vs not helpful answers

The weekly traffic of 3M ends only in 4 per thousand cases in a question. This still means quite a workload and it looks like SuMo has been doing a splendid job during the release weeks. Lately however … it looks like users already know what to ask about Aurora.

Would you care to join us and give us a hand? https://support.mozilla.com/de/home

Conclusion

The answers are there, but what are the questions? This walk-through can just hint at the possibilities that could make SuMo serve our customers even better.

January 19

tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE INANIMATE OBJECT?

my paintbrush