Achievements so far
- web site in 21 languages , key for isolated communities
- 10 million unique visitors per month, 250 million hits
- FOSDEM participation every year with our own conference room and booth, focus on l10n techniques and issues
- Conferences all over Europe to promote our technology
- Good collaboration with several European administrations on the subject of Open Standards
- Collaboration with several European PR agencies, more to come
- Funnyfox marketing campaign in 2005 (first viral video campaign)
- Hosting Firefox start pages for all languages but English, including languages outside Europe (mozilla-world.org)
European Firefox Market share is the highest in the world
How do we work ?
Tools
- Backoffice : PHP/Mysql, SVN, TRAC, XHTML templates
(We dropped Bugzilla and CVS)
- Mail management : OTRS
- News and PR : Dotclear blogging system module, wiki syntax
- internal communication : mailing lists, IRC channel (#europe on irc.mozilla.org), instant messaging
Human Resources
- 2 full-time employees, one is a Mozilla code super-reviewer and module owner
- 5 board members from different European countries (France, Belgium, germany, Poland)
- ~35 "active" members, collaborators who translate and maintain their localized version
- hundreds of members that join the association at Fosdem and other events
- help from mozilla community members to organize events
Translation process
- English version of the site is the reference version
- One public server and one stage server
- Translators work directly on simple XHTML UTF8-encoded files (text editor)
- Key vocabulary and download links are in php includes (similar to .dtd files)
- Pages published to stage with web form or via SVN
- Publishing to WWW by a board member
- All versions identical, except key areas like 'support' pages
- Specific content changes are accepted only if they make sense
Problems we had to face
- We didn't expect that many languages and handling start pages outside Europe
- Some communities are disorganized or too small for quick changes
- 3 Radical changes of layout to follow mozilla.org/com redesigns
- Layout has to be flexible enough to adapt to very different languages
- File structure had to be reorganized to facilitate localized screenshots and images
- Handling of unsynced localization, what to show when 1.5 is not released in all languages
- How to answer thousands of emails in 21 languages ? -> a better contact page change divided messages per 5
A few lessons learnt over time
- Big communities (French, German, Polish) and small languages with a strong opensource community (Finnish, Catalan, Czech...) work best
- Some communities are less interested in having pages in their languages than others (scandinavian countries)
- A couple of languages are a real problem (ex: no pt-PT firefox 1.5)
- Make it simple for translators : CVS -> SVN, Bugzilla -> TRAC, Wiki
- We use Wiki more and more for organisationnal purposes
- Some things are done faster and better by one person than by many (localized screenshots, download links updates)
- Clever CSS allowed us to change our design, hide content per language, adapt to hebrew, include start pages... without touching our backend
Things that still need improvement
- We need to strenghten our team to update faster and more often
- We need to visually improve the site without l10n impacts (screenshots, buttons...
- We need to improve the publishing process (it was good for 4 languages only...)
- publish a whole language at once
- publish one specific page in x languages
- push all stage to www at once
- better versionning control with alerts if page X isn't updated in language Y
- We need to improve and automate products version management on the site