Managing different types of content and changes for l10n-drivers team

Hi everyone,

The l10n-drivers’ role within Mozilla is to manage translation and
localization projects for every part of the organization. To use an
analogy, we're the garden hose that carries water (translatable content) to
different places, without controlling the faucet.

Over the last 18 months, we've seen a 3x increase of translatable material
across many different content types. Some of this content is exactly the
type that brought you to contribute to Mozilla: long-lasting
product-content that advances Mozilla's mission. A lot of it, however, is
single use content that is generated sporadically and lives for maybe a
month. Many of you have expressed your concerns to us about the latter
types of content and told us, both anecdotally and through your Pontoon
activity, that there are more impactful types of content at Mozilla that
you'd rather contribute to. And so, with that in mind, in 2019 we're
introducing some changes that will support your desire to localize
impactful content as well as allow the l10n-drivers to continue to meet the
demand for translation and localization of single use content:


   1.

   Continuous Localization - We’re applying the continuous localization
   system from Firefox in products for other platforms, starting with Android.
   This system allows you to localize new content as soon as it’s available,
   while also making your contributions available to ship just as quickly.
   This gets your contributions in front of user eyes as early as possible,
   increasing its impact on the user experience.
   2.

   Mozilla.org Improvements - We’re working with the mozilla.org team to
   replace the .lang system and split up content. Our goal is to use a more
   flexible localization system in the site (hopefully Fluent) and to split up
   content by its impact, lifespan, and rate of change. Pages with high
   impact, long lifespan, and low rate of change will continue to be available
   to localize through Pontoon. This will reduce the amount of translatable
   content, making it easier to contribute to mozilla.org in an impactful
   way.
   3.

   Single Use Content to Vendors - We’re establishing processes that, by
   default, send certain types of content to trusted, evaluated vendors. This
   content will be things you’ve told us are less impactful/interesting
   content, like short-lived marketing campaigns, emails, surveys, etc. We’ve
   spent the last 6 months evaluating vendors (thanks to all of you who have
   helped us with this) and are happy with the ones we’ve selected. We’ve also
   experimented with this for a couple of pilot locales and have seen positive
   results from both community and staff alike. This will contribute to
   reducing the overall amount of translatable content in Pontoon,
   specifically the content you’ve expressed concerns about translating in the
   past.


As work progresses with these items, we’ll make sure to keep everyone
informed. We ask for your patience and feedback to help us make these
changes smoothly. If you have any questions about this, please reply to
this thread.

Finally, I’d like to take this opportunity to announce some updates to the
l10n-drivers team structure:

   1.

   Zibi (Gandalf) Braniecki has recently made significant contributions to
   Firefox’s architecture through porting the .dtd/.properties localization
   system to Fluent, as well as developing and implementing standardized
   internationalization APIs from ECMAScript and Unicode. He’s been asked to
   increase these contributions by moving to the Browser Architecture team
   full-time. Considering the significant impact Zibi has had on various l10n
   tools over the years, we’re excited to see his contributions expanded to
   more of Firefox!
   2.

   As of Friday, 22 March, I’ll be taking a 12 week parental leave of
   absence [1]. I won’t be responding to emails, IRC, Slack, or Telegram
   during that time and plan to nuke my whole inbox when I return. Flod will
   be stepping in for me while I’m away, and as always, you can also email
   [email protected] if you need to reach someone from the team.


Thank you all again for your outstanding contributions and for spending
your time helping us make the Web more multilingual.

Jeff

[1] https://twitter.com/gueroJeff/status/1107336921594748928
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