News

Mozilla – Portland

“So I relocated across to Portland and started working on the User Advocacy team for FireFoxOS Support. My main tasks where to help bring some technical expertise to the team to help them build a set of tools for their reporting. My time with Mozilla in Portland was short and during that time I got to get a lot achieved with a main achievement leading the push to have input.mozilla.org non english content translated. This was a concern for me from when I first started working on input and with the advocacy team. We where wanting to do meaningful statistics but 80% of FireFoxOS data was non english, 70% of FireFox on Android was non English and under 40% of FireFox Browser data was non English.

The volumes of FireFox Browser user feedback numbers are significantly higher and due to numbers it was not seen feasible to perform automatic translation on such a high number (April 2014). However I felt that only taking into account the english translation for Android and FireFoxOS builds was not presenting accurate statistics as the majority of the users where non english speakers. I am glad to say that this project was a success and we turned on translations. This was not performed by myself but the maintainer of input.firefox.org and hats off to him for his great work. The main part I played was just to see it to fruition and ensure it got turned on and that user feedback from non english speaking countries was being taken into account.

In the FireFoxOS support team we were taking non English speaking feedback however the translation aspect of it was a human manual translation so I personally spent a lot of time manually cutting and pasting data from a google spreadsheet to translator back to the spreadsheet. Yes I had travelled all the way across the world to perform manual translation. I am proud to say that Android and FireFoxOS teams now take into account Non English user feedback, and the User Advocacy also had some infograph report style templates designs, a new HTML template to replace their old plain text emails. “