On 2009-01-20, Alain and Marta and André did a 5h translation session on the Mozilla support site. This is the feedback based on that experience.

• AD: First thing I notice is that it's hard to find stuff to translate.
  • For example, I can see a list of popular articles on this page:
    • http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-wiki_rankings.php?locale=en-US&limit=500&categId=1
  • but I can't tell which ones are in need of translation. I have to browse through each of them to see if it does.
  • Even there, I have be logged in if I want to see the notification that a page needs translation (I wasn't logged in at first).
  • I also note that the documentation on this page: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Translating+articles says that the translation notice should appear at the top, whereas it actually appears on the right column.
  • Altogether, it took me 25 mins to find a page to translate, but considering that I was often talking with André, I would say it would have been 10 mins uninterrupted.
• Another irritant is that once I found a page to translate and click on help translate, it asked me to login. Yet, I was already logged in.
• I notice that on Sumo, the language link is way at the bottom and not very noticeable.
• There seems to be a major bug.
  • I go to this page:
  • http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Configuring+AVG+Internet+Security
  • And click on the Language link, I don't see French in the list. Yet, if I click on the Translate link, I don't see French as one of the languages that I can translate to. But I get a choice to translate into Albanian, etc...
• So... I went to this page instead:
  • http://support.mozilla.com/fr/kb/Using+the+Windows+Media+Player+plugin+with+Firefox
  • I saw the note at the top which said that the French content is out of date compared to the English version.
  • My first reflex was to go to the link that says Traduire cette page (further down on the right).
  • But, this is for translating to a new language. Instead, I have to click on "View changes and update currently viewed language version". I had seen that link, but since it did not contain the word translate, I hadn't realized that it was for translating updates.
  • First thing I notice is that the wiki markup contains a number of cryptic codes. For example:
    • {SHOWFOR(spans=on)/}
  • As a software developer, I feel relatively comfortable with this, but I suspect non-tecchies won't know what to do with that.
  • Second, I see a long section highlighted in greeen:
    • 
  • But when I look in the French, it seems that all of it has already been translated. As the developer, I think i know why. Probably somebody translated it, but did not click on Complete Translation. So system thinks it's still needs translation. OK, no problem. But I still need to compare the green stuff to the French stuff and am having difficulty doing it because I use a screen with very little resolution (may not be a problem with larger screens).
  • Après comparaison, je m'apercois que c'est la section Advanced information qui a été ajoutée.
  • Je copie coller.
  • Je sais pas comment traduire 'advanced information'. Ca me prendrait un concordanceur genre webitext.
  • Quand vient le moment de traduire le terme plugin, je ne sais pas quel équivalent français est standardisé sur le site Mozilla. Ça serait bien d'avoir une Mémoire de traduction qui permettrait de chercher à l'intérieur du site.
  • Un moment donné, le texte pointe vers la page: Using the QuickTime plugin with Firefox, mais je ne sais pas si la page a été traduite en Français, et si oui, quel est le nom de cette page. Pour trouver la réponse, je dois ouvrir une autre page, et aller à Using the QuickTime plugin with Firefox, et aller voir s'il y a une version Française. Il n'y en a pas. Je veux traduire le lien et en faire un lien vers une nouvelle page française, mais ça me distrairait de ma tâche. Pour le moment, je laisse le lien vers la page anglaise.
  • After 60 minutes of translation, I feel like I would like to save the translation and label at least parts of it as complete translations. But I can't do this until I finish the whole page.
• OK, now I am done with translating this page. Now I remember that the page contained some links to English pages and I want to translate them to links to a French page. In particular, I want to create a French version of Using the QuickTime plugin with Firefox, and link to it instead of to the English version.
  • But... unfortunately, I can't edit the http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-wiki_rankings.php?locale=en-US&limit=500&categId=1

Conclusions

• We need a feature that allows people to easily find a translation task that they can actually deal with
  • List of tasks in source and target language that I master
  • Those that are Urgent translation requests should be at the top.
  • Should put Marta on this.

• Need a way to find out what terminology choices have been made on a given wiki site (ex: browser = fureteur or navigateur?)
  • Local terminology database, or local translation memory
  • Youcef is working on those.

• Translation of links is probably a common problem