571269 - localization of submission pages

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Input :: General, enhancement, P1)

Description

[Aakash Desai [:aakashd]]

We need l10n support on our submission pages and dashboard (if possible)

Questions to Answer:
- Do we have support for l10n on mozilla.com properties already? 
- If so, how difficult would it be to integrate that into our system?
- If not, how much work (time and resources) would be required to get this accomplished? Is there another solution available we can plug in?

Comment 1

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

We can use the tower[1] library probably, and just mark the strings in question as localizable. It's pretty easy (which in the L10n world doesn't mean a lot ;) ). I am guessing one man-day of work.

Actually getting the stuff translated is less fun: We need to drop the Gettext files into SVN and hook them up to localize.mozilla.org, and then periodically re-import those into the actual application. Sigh.

[1] http://github.com/clouserw/tower/

Comment 2

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

FTR: That'll also change our URLs to .../en-US/sad and friends.

Comment 3

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

Another problem here will be the term extraction: The library[1] we use only comes with an extractor for English.

If we split to just splitting words, we'll get a lot of semantically useless results (like articles).

[1] http://pypi.python.org/pypi/topia.termextract/

Comment 4

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

Talked to Seth today, and we should do it like AMO: Need to _() and extract the localizable strings, then put those into SVN. From there, we can pull them into Verbatim, and finally we can pull them from SVN to git before we push a new release to prod.

Comment 5

[Aakash Desai [:aakashd]]

We just need to make sure we're at a string freeze relatively quickly. I learned that we need to be ready with this by 7/22 from the Fx 4 Beta breakout session. 

This means that we'll need a string freeze on our pages ASAP. So, let's target this Wednesday July 14th for that.

Comment 6

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

Note that the term extraction is still an unsolved problem. I'll see what the term extractor does when I throw German at it. We'll see how that performs.

Also, it's not as easy as simply translating the submission pages: If we ask for feedback in, say, Chinese, we must not be surprised if people answer in Chinese. So we need to save feedback by locales -- that, in turn, means we should also allow changing the locale for the dashboard and search. We *can* ignore that for now and, while saving the locale to the DB, just display everything in one pile, but as a second step, dividing the dashboard by locale will become important.

Comment 7

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

(In reply to comment #6)
> I'll see what the term extractor does when I throw German at it.

Somewhat as expected: It extracts almost every word in the sentence as a "term", regardless of part-of-speech, as it knows nothing about German. Somewhat worse: It applies English stemming to words, thus cutting off the second s from words that end in two s'es.

Not quite great.

Comment 8

[Aakash Desai [:aakashd]]

Attachment: Ability-to-change-languages-on-all-pages mock

Comment 9

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

L10n libraries are here: http://github.com/fwenzel/reporter/commit/00eb75c

That changes all URLs to /en-US/sad (etc.). Only en-US is currently supported.

Next I'll mark all existing strings as localizable.

Comment 10

[Aakash Desai [:aakashd]]

Will this break any our URLs from the feedback buttons?

Comment 11

[Aakash Desai [:aakashd]]

Actually, checking myself.

Comment 12

[Aakash Desai [:aakashd]]

Alright, WFM on stage.

Comment 13

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

German localization is done, should be working, but input.stage is not updating (bug 578410) :(

Comment 14

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

The language switcher has landed as well. The project is now localizable.

Comment 15

[Aakash Desai [:aakashd]]

Looks good on the de language via pages sad, happy, page not found, download, dashboard and search results. Let's get this in the hands of the localizers

Comment 16

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

It's on Verbatim, and I've emailed the localizers. When people finish their translations, I can pull them in off L10n and activate their locales.

http://localize.mozilla.org/projects/input/