Hi,
figuring out language variants is an old problem, and we haven't made a
ton of success.
Back in the navigator days, we had a concept called "region packs",
which basically tried to do all the -CD stuff in a localization. But we
never really got the distinction between language and region worked out.
That's mostly because there's no clear distinction, people are just a mess.
Thus we dropped region packs alltogether, and said "whenever you want
something different, create a localization".
This isn't the most effective way of doing it either, as it says that
the shared work needs to be duplicated.
There are a few ways around that:
Sparse localizations with a fallback sequence. ar-TN falls back to ar
falls back to fr falls back to en-US, for example. Depending on the
infrastructure and packaging, this can be done either at runtime or
buildtime.
Forks on a version control level. This is a good idea if the
modifications are actually pretty widespread, but requires more
technical understanding, and good interaction within the community
working on those variants. You need to understand where a particular fix
goes, and be able to discuss if a change is a local variant or a bug
upstream. With some creative tooling, though, you can be very systematic
about maintaining your own variant, and create a consistent UX beyond a
few spotty fixes.
The two can obviously be combined, ar-TN could be a fork of ar, and have
runtime fallback to French in favor of English in case the localization
is incomplete or we're facing technical jargon.
I don't have hopes that we'd be able to re-introduce the concept of
region packs, beyond a very limited set of settings for features, I guess.
Axel
On 3/6/14, 8:03 PM, Ahmed Nefzaoui wrote:
Hi All,
Just wanted to share this pad, https://etherpad.mozilla.org/RTL-UX
Pad
was started by kazé, I recently added the "arabic-specific"
section, based on a little on-going research on few Desktop and Mobile OSes
with help from Rami (Cc).
Please have a look and just bear in mind that what's written there is meant to
possibly become reality on a long term and based on what priorities we have in
the same topic (RTL).
For example, and depending on the content of the pad, a Firefox OS launched in Tunisia
could have a different Arabic "locale profile", saying ar-TN, than what it
could be in Saudi Arabia for exemple (ar-SA), not just in localization, but also in some
UI parts.
Also this raises the question: How could Firefox OS be region-customizable, while this might be
possible and then I have no idea what I'm talking about, the solution would be to have some sort of
different "region-based profiles" or "locale profiles" so when building with
GAIA_LOCALE_PROFILE=ar-TN we get a different set of configurations than with ar-SA, e.g ar-TN
stands for a profile that includes French keyboard layout, Arabic layout and use Western Arabic
Numeral, rather than the Eastern Arabic Numerals used by most the Arab world.
And again details in the pad.
Thank you
Regards,
Nefzaoui
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: Wed, 5 Feb 2014 09:43:41 +0000
CC: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected];
[email protected]; [email protected]
Subject: Re: [b2g] Arabic/Hebrew and Right-To-Left support
Hi all,
I'd like to begin with thanking Kazé for the huge help he's giving me, thank
you :))Also as he mentioned I'm in the process of planning to transform this
year's meetup of arabic mozilla into an Arabic localization event for Firefox
OS where selected members of the localization community will attend. So it's
rather a smaller number of attendees than a wide meetup.Anyway, I'd like you
all please to consider joining, maybe we can work on some RTL bugs if it gets
official support (if I understood well..).Any way, this huge interest in RTL
development is really making me smile that I can't even figure out what I add
to the topic.. :)Thank you all :)
Cheers,Nefzaoui
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]; [email protected]
Date: Tue, 4 Feb 2014 18:35:02 +0100
CC: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected];
[email protected]
Subject: Re: [b2g] Arabic/Hebrew and Right-To-Left support
(resending to include m.d.b2g; my email client tricked me)
Hey Kazé!
Thanks for starting the conversation! I'm about to post to dev-l10n to
bootstrap a wider taskforce whose goal will be to help define good UX
and developer guidelines and test Gaia against them. More details in
the newsgroup soon.
Quoting Fabien Cazenave (2014-02-04 17:17:58)
My opinion about that is that's it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg
problem: we won't get proper RTL support without supporting Arabic
(or Hebrew) officially, and vice-versa.
Suggestion: what about promoting Arabic to an "officially supported
locale" status, include it in our test builds, and get some help from
the Arabic-speaking community to report RTL issues and propose fixes?
I think you're right, it is a chicken and an egg problem, but I'd
suggest first fixing two things in parallel:
1. UX guidelines: we can and should start with UX; let's compile
a list of good guidelines so that we know what the desired behavior
is and what is currently broken; the community's help is going to
be crucial here, b/c they're our eyes and ears in the RTL markets
and they understand the needs of the users much better than we do;
2. RTL localizations: I know it's not fun right now to localize into
RTL languages b/c most of Gaia is broken (with a few notable
exceptions, like the Settings app!). But if we can get some
traction with Arabic for example and get those 1200 missing strings
translated, it would help a lot with testing.
Once we have the guidelines, we can start filing bugs; once we have
the bugs, we can know how much work it will take to make Gaia support
RTL fully; once we have the work estimate, we should promote Arabic to
an officially supported locale. Let's make this an informed decision
and demonstrate our full committment by gathering data first. That's
why I started the wiki page you linked to in your email:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/L10n:B2G/RTL
I'm going to get my hands on an iOS device tomorrow and fill in the
details in the Competitive Analysis section.
I also triaged most of the bugs I could find related to rtl, bidi,
right-to-left, Arabic etc and set them as dependencies of
https://bugzil.la/906270.
Ahmed suggested to organize a localization sprint for Firefox OS
during the next Arabic Mozilla meet-up. I think it would be a great
opportunity for a couple Gaia developers and UX engineers to meet the
Arabic community and land the most important RTL fixes while the
translation is being done.
These are two great ideas: an l10n sprint as Ahmed suggests would help
us with #2 above; an engineering sprint will move us closer to having
good support for RTL eventually, but I believe we first need to
establish good guidelines with UX, as per #1 above.
I'll start the UX discussion in the newsgroup and reach out to relevant
folks. There's an interesting session related to RTL planned for this
Friday as part of the UX workweek in SF. I'm hoping we can make the
recording public.
-stas
--
@stas
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