An important issue in the Arabic locale - FYKA

[Zaid Ibhais]

Dear all,
Hope you are doing well.

Fracisco and Pierros, as we previously discussed in the leadership summit in Singapore about the problems we are facing in the Arabic locale, actually the problems are getting bigger and we need to stop it.

The Jordanian community has done around 90% of the "Firefox for IOS" project and was 100% translated and reviewed, Abdelrahman Manna went through the strings to do the RTL testing and suddenly discovered that most of the strings have been replaced by Khaled Hosny; knowing that he didn't translate a lot of strings as it is right now (to be clear, he replaced the translated strings that were already submitted).

Plus, he did the replacement with a pure translated words (not localized) and these words are not used in the Arabic region in anyway.

And now, the Jordanian community especially Abdelrahman and I are upset, because we are seeing our contributions getting replaced without knowing the reasons behind that even though our submitted ones are right.

Finally we are asking you to find solutions for this big problem in order to stop this conflict.


All thanks.
Regards.
Zaid Ibhais.

[Khaled Hosny]

Hi all,

On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 09:21:56PM +0000, Zaid Ibhais wrote:
> Dear all,
> Hope you are doing well.
>
> Fracisco and Pierros, as we previously discussed in the leadership
> summit in Singapore about the problems we are facing in the Arabic
> locale, actually the problems are getting bigger and we need to stop
> it.

I can’t comment on this having not been present in that event nor have
seen any of the mentioned discussion shared with other community members
on this list.

> The Jordanian community has done around 90% of the "Firefox for IOS"
> project and was 100% translated and reviewed, Abdelrahman Manna went
> through the strings to do the RTL testing and suddenly discovered that
> most of the strings have been replaced by Khaled Hosny; knowing that
> he didn't translate a lot of strings as it is right now (to be clear,
> he replaced the translated strings that were already submitted).

Me and Safa Safa Alfulaij reviewed the Firefox iOS translation (not just
me) because it had many quality issues.

The translation was very inconsistent, with the same thing translated
differently in different places. There were also some spelling mistakes
and other poor Arabic phrasing.

It was also inconsistent with existing Firefox desktop and Android
translations, both in using different terminology and it translating
phrases that exist identically in other Firefoxes in a different way,
which will be confusing for anyone coming from Firefox for desktop
(large part of the target Firefox for iOS audience, I believe).

As a member of this community I acted in good faith and tried to improve
the Firefox iOS translation to maintain the high standard of translation
we have been trying to achieve in other Firefox localisation. If people
have problems with that translation, we should be openly discussing it
here (which did not happen to the best of my knowledge).

> Plus, he did the replacement with a pure translated words (not
> localized) and these words are not used in the Arabic region in
> anyway.

I don’t think I understand the complaint here, care to elaborate?

> And now, the Jordanian community especially Abdelrahman and I are
> upset, because we are seeing our contributions getting replaced
> without knowing the reasons behind that even though our submitted ones
> are right.

Reviewing translation is an integral part of the process, that shouldn’t
be something to be upset about. Other Mozilla localisation teams have
very strict policies about translation quality and nothing gets in
without strict review.

> Finally we are asking you to find solutions for this big problem in
> order to stop this conflict.

I have to say that I find it very upsetting to ask Mozilla employees to
intervene in the localisation process (something that never happened in
the nearly 10 years I have been contributing to the Firefox
localisation).

Regards,
Khaled

[Delphine Lebédel]

Hello everyone

Since this is a localization topic, I think this would have been better
sent off to localization-drivers if the communication is broken between
localizers.

Please, let's stop this discussion now here, and let's wait for us
(l10n-drivers) to answer this. Most of us are in a time-zone where it's
either super early or late, so please give us the time tomorrow (well,
Thursday that is) to answer fully to this.

Thank you
Delphine

[Delphine Lebédel]

Hello everyone,

Seems like there are multiple issues at play here. Let’s all approach these
issues assuming everyone is working with best intentions and we are all
committed to building the best Arabic versions of Mozilla products that we
can. In all the discussions that follow let’s all stay committed to those
principles.

First, I would like to address the localization issue that is described
here.

We need to find ways to improve communication between localizers working on
the Arabic version. Khaled is familiar with our processes for landing
localization changes and appears in general to be following them correctly.
Improvements could be made to ensure that Khaled and Zaid discussed the
strings they both worked on, and that these strings landed without
surprises.

Direct e-mail, telephone or video call communication - rather than through
a variety of social media channels - will help to focus the discussions and
get better resolutions, and do so in a faster and more effective way.
Writing emails to multiple unrelated mailing lists and trying to involve
other parts of the organization that don’t work directly on localization
are also not constructive ways to approach these kind of issues.

Writing a direct email asking to explain the reasons behind those string
changes, or discussing inside the Arabic community as a whole, would have
been a far better approach. For any issues that remain let's all commit to
that kind of communication and discussion. It sounds like agreement on some
untranslated terms is such an issue. Let’s take that to private e-mail, the
Arabic news group, or a conversation to layout a proposal on how to proceed
or resolve. See more on this below.

Following the landing of the strings, and before RTL testing began, we
should also strive to make sure testers know what to be looking for and how
to evaluate and test. For example, let’s work on creating an RTL spec for
iOS, just as was done for FxOS. This helps ensure consistency and coherency
amongst not only that product, but all other Mozilla products. In that
case, a good place for this discussion to happen would be the dev.rtl
mailing list.

In fact, between all of us Mozilla community members, we need to always
assume by default that we are acting in good faith. Khaled did not make
these changes with bad intention. As he states, these were made with the
intent of improving the localization quality and ensuring consistency among
all our products. This is common in l10n process. We also want to encourage
discussion about what will get us to the best translation and best
products, but let’s do that in an orderly way through the filing of bugs
for individual issues or working out general principles for the locale in
the form of a style guide.

We are going to work on making this process clearer and start drafting out
“best practices” for style guides to ensure we are all on the same page.
But in the meantime, let’s focus on moving forwards and not keeping grudges
against each other.

For example, a constructive idea would be to start a discussion between
Arabic localizers about the replacement with pure translated words vs
localized words. The dev.l10n.ar mailing list is a good place to start
this. As a matter of fact, all this discussion should probably have started
there first (or on bugzilla). Once agreement is reached all our products
might need adjustment to improve quality and consistency.

Consistency in our terminology across products and marketing campaigns is
important, and so let’s all commit to using tools like Transvision (
http://transvision.mozfr.org/) to help identify and enforce consistency.

In conclusion, let’s ensure this discussion stays constructive and works
toward improving quality and consistency, and that we all assume we’re
working in the common goal of creating the best localized products we can.

thank you!

Delphine, on behalf of l10n-drivers