L10n:WorldReady

Draft

Introduction

Those that participate on the Mozilla Project can take great pride in the level of localization awareness that has been generated and the participation of communities around the world that enabled 24 localized versions to ship simultaneous with Firefox 1.0, and the fact that we have grown that to over 83+ localized versions in Firefox 4.0.

The "Mozilla World Ready" project is about extending that success to more efficiently and effectively build on that success by creating greater awareness around localization issues, education, and taking steps addressing these problems that limit our ability to reach and connect users around the world.

General Strategy for Improved l10n

Get localization teams provide early feedback and to say yes early in development, rather than no late in the development. Move beyond the model of doing development work, then "throwing over the wall" to localization teams. In general, don't treat l10n as an addition (e.g. on a tight schedule, don't say 'we'll do l10n in phase 2') Provide early "labeling" of projects and campaigns to indicate the markets where they are intended. Some examples of lables:

Top Ten Ideas for Improving Localization

1. When the message needs to stay very close to the same across locales this requires maxium amount of early coordination between development/creative lead and global representatives, since the terms will be required to be universally used across the globe

more about some specific example that have been probmatic in product naming and consistent messaging.

 personas -> person
 workspace -> scratchpad  --> tools | scratchpad

 sumo site design -- selection of site theme/style
 US - friendly and approachable v. international preference for more formal and concise
 Nurse and cat have pornographic connotations in some Asian markets (Try google search for "Asian Nurse")
 In this case SUMO design has been made flexible to remove the image.  JA is using this. See: http://support.mozilla.com/ja/home  
 Maybe this design is more suitable for locales where a more formal approach is desirable.    

Thinking about and supporting possible multiple designs for sumo might have been, or still might be possible, but expensive. In this way we might have a "friendly design" and a "formal/consise design" and each locale could opt in to the design best suited to the locale.

2. Where we want names and concepts to be adapted to a locale, state those things up front. Write content and concepts of campaigns in Basic English first, or just share more of these early planing designs flexible global outreach (message needs follow generally, but then tuned for specific locales)

        Requires additional work by development/creative lead to explain intent of the campaign and were local flexibility is desired.
        Then localize it to en-US and or to be hip or trendy.  
        Maybe some some kind of "markup language" can be used to express both the intent and the implementation
        (experiment proposed by pfinch and stas; see [1] and [2])

3. Avoid slang, trendy catch phrases in the design, and when they are required explain the intended affect or meaning. Some examples

 "triple threat" v. multi-demensional 

 Awesome ---   http://matejnovak.com/2011/05/10/owning-awesome/
 Awe actually meant “terror” or “dread” until the late 1700s, from which point on it retained only the slightly softer meaning of 
 “reverential fear or wonder” (all definitions from the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary).  Awesome came along in the late 16th century 
 meaning “filled with awe” and then “inspiring awe” about a century later, both of which are still in use today. The positive
 colloquialism meaning “outstanding, remarkable” didn’t come along until the mid 20th century (interestingly enough, that came after the 
 adverb form, awesomely, began to mean “outstanding, very” in the late 19th century). All that brings us to today and the late 1900s slang 
 meaning of “excellent” or “marvelous.”
   or  "scary cool..."

4. Define use of nouns, verbs and adjectives when there are used in the design or copy

5. Watch out for possible character space mismatches in the design. Consider places where more space is need for text is needed for Italian and other languages with our designs. i.e. it will take 30 characters to express what we might write in 15."

        francesco had some examples here.   can you repeat them?