Tag: pontoon

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Pontoon has a new leader!

Oh, Pontoon, hi! When we introduced the idea of Pontoon on the forum of Mozilla Planet, it generated quite a lot of positive comments, but nothing close to what has happened when we showed the first live demo (Shaver did!) at Mozilla All-Hands in 2010.

Pontoon represents what, I believe, will be the future of web localization and I tried my best to rush it to the point where we will be able to verify if such an approach is realistic, but from there, I failed to find enough time to give this project the love it deserves.

Worry not, great ideas don’t perish, and it sometimes takes a vacuum to appear for a new leader to step in!

I had luck to drive Pontoon to the point where it attracted several souls from Mozilla community to keep pinging me, keep asking about it, and, what’s always the best result of an idea, to act.

In particular one gentleman, my long time friend from Slovenia – Matjaž Horvat, stepped up and took what was there, turned a crank, wrote some code, draw a mockup, moved pieces around, stitched it a bit, and probably invoked some primal magic to assemble new version of it, available here – http://horv.at/pontoon/.

He was able to take the source code to the next level and covered up the visual appearance and user experience zone which has been sorta ignored since we started and needed love. He was also willing to jump in and join me and we’re lucky enough to get Mozilla backing for this project which resulted in Pontoon having a new leader!

I’m proud to announce that I’m stepping down from Pontoon leadership position and Matjaz is taking over! I’ll be serving him as a mentor and a peer and I’m absolutely confident that the baby is in the right hands!

Please, join me in congratulating Matjaž!

You can also track his progress at http://horv.at/blog/ and on Twitter.:)

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main mozilla tech

Mozilla Summit 2010 – Localization 2.0 talk

Here come slides I used for Summit 2010 Localization 2.0 talk.

It was a very tough talk to give. Hard to grasp, hard to explain. I originally wanted to devote it exclusively to L20n, and make it as a form of tech talk, but eventually figured out it will not work and there’s much broader vision I need to explain. Thus a few hours before the talk I started rewriting it and end up with what you can find here.

Of course slides alone will tell you just a small part of the story, but it’s better than nothing. 😉

Localization 2.0 – Mozilla Summit 2010

View more presentations from zbraniecki.

Thanks to all who participated in this! I know it eats a lot of brain cycles to process and it was already 4pm, but I hope you enjoyed it! 🙂

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main mozilla tech

Pontoon – more details and 0.2 plans

Catching up from the blog post that introduced Pontoon, I’d like to present the project in a little more detail and the vision for a near future.

Clients

As stated previously, Pontoon 0.1 introduces two types of clients – web client and jetpack client. Both share majority of code base (Pontoon, jQuery, jQueryDomec and heavily modified editableText plugin), but because of the limitations of jetpack prototype I had to merge them into one JS file.

user experience

For user interface of Pontoon 0.2 I’d like to focus on a few key aspects that may make Pontoon a tool ready to use in work environment:

  • Introduce identification system that will sign contributions made by a given user. We may use Verbatim accounts for now.
  • Figure out a way to recognize the state of localization and allow for continuing localization.
  • Add ability to view/edit entity in a source view. (much like wordpress’s HTML view)
  • Fix some common cases like entity with a single anchor should treat the anchor as an entity, not its parent
  • Improve UI to look nicer and inform user on the outcome of his actions.

With those six improvements (including two top ones which are major), Pontoon will become, in my opinion, ready for real life use and we may offer it for one of the upcoming small websites for those brave souls who would like to test it.

code base

On the code base front, I will definitely want to clean up the sources, which will be easier when jetpack client get updated to new jetpack architecture. editableText plugin will require a cleanup and will be extended to allow source view, so it may make sense to fork it as a separate project, while other classes should be refactored and site-dependent code should be moved away from libraries. Also, CSS inclusions should be merged into libraries.

One thing I’d like to see soon is a third type of a client – one that may be embedded into any website so that the website author can turn on and off the “localization” mode.

Server

Pontoon server will require adaptation to the client side changes, like ability to identify/authenticate users, and then two new things should be possible with the data received from a client. First, server should be able to add translations as suggestions in Verbatim. This way users will be able to suggest translations, leaving up to the registered localizers what to do with it. This workflow is an intended one for Pontoon.

Second thing, is that we should be able to generate a pure, localized HTML file out of a source one and translation list. This way we will be able to localize things like SUMO documents or plain HTML sites that do not use Gettext or even PHP.

Hooks

Hooks will go through a major rewrite, because I want to test the concept of providing an external meta file with information like lists of entities for the client to read. Such meta information is the most natural way to also add ability to pick up localization from a midpoint. The issue here is that of course this will not help the client with localization of websites that do not use pontoon hooks.

It would be also great to add Django hooks, since so many websites this days are migrating to django, and it would also allow us to test how cross-linguistic the hook system is.

Summary

This is my plan for a short term, and I’ll try to get as many of the features described above into Pontoon 0.2 as possible. I prepared a wiki article describing the plan, and I’m open to feedback, ideas, and of course, contribution. 🙂

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main mozilla tech

Pontoon – introduction

One of the three core types of content I described in my previous blog post is what I call rich content.

This type of localizable content has certain characteristics that are very different from the common UI entities. Starting from different goal (to provide information), through different size (long sentences, paragraphs), different l10n flexibility (needs ability to reorder, extend, shrink long texts) to much richer syntax (sentences can be styled with HTML, CSS).

Almost a year ago I started playing around some type of a web tool that would allow for WYSIWYG style localization for the web, later picked up by Ozten in his blog post about potential use cases, and finally landed on Fred Wenzel’s mind as he decided to give this idea a try. He ignited the project, and created first iteration of the UI, where I joined him, and added server side.

Now, the idea itself is neither new nor shocking. Many projects were experimenting with some forms of live localization for web content but the solutions we know so far are hardly adaptable for generic purposes. Some require a lot of prerequisites, others are gettext only, and they come as black-box solution which requires you to follow all the procedures and lock your process in.

Pontoon is different in the sense that it is a toolset that allows for rich content localization with grading amount of prerequisites and varying strictness of output. It’s a very alpha mode tool, so be kind, but I think it’s ready to get the first round of feedback 🙂

Pontoon – components

Pontoon is composed of three elements:

  • client – pontoon client is an application that allows for content navigation and localization. It’s responsible for analyzing content and providing ways for the user to translate it.
  • server – pontoon server is an application that the client communicates with in order to send/update translations provided by the localizer and store them later for the website to use.
  • hook – pontoon hook is a small library that can be hooked into a target application in order to provide additional information for the client to improve its abilities.

There are various clients possible, for now we have two – HTML website as a client, and Jetpack 0.8.1 based one. They share a lot of code and they operate quite similarly.

We have one server – django based one – that can receive translations provided by the client, and uses Silme to store them into a file (currently .po), and we have one hook – for PHP – that adds special meta headers and provides simple API for modified gettext calls that gives client direct information on where the entities are located, so that the client does not have to guess.

I’ll dig into details in a separate post, there’s much more into how Pontoon can operate and what are the possible enhancements for each of the three components, but for now, I’d like to present you a short video of Pontoon used to localize two old versions of our website projects.

The video is a coffee-long, so feel free to grab one and schedule 6 minutes 🙂

urls used in the video:

notes:

  • the locale codes that are supported by the server are usually ab_CD, not ab – for example de_DE, fr_FR etc.
  • pontoon does not support multiple users at the same time, so you may observe strange results when many people will try it at the same time. Enjoy alpha mode!
  • “0.1 alpha” means – I’m looking for feedback, comments, ideas and contributions 🙂