Wednesday, August 1, 2007

L10n of support.mozilla.com

This is a follow-up to my earlier post about localization of the Firefox support project on support.mozilla.com.

The first step in localization is launching the beta en-US version of SUMO. Once we have a few weeks of good user feedback and data, we can determine which support articles are the most useful and stable (there is even a metric for this!). The most useful/stable articles will be rank ordered for localization.

Why the useful/stable metric? We want to make sure that users in all locales have current and correct articles. Some locale support teams will be robust enough to manage all the necessary changes in existing and new content. Some locales, though, will have smaller teams who will need to do high leverage translation—so we want to make sure the articles they translate aren’t going to change the next day.

The SUMO knowledge base beta should be live in September. We are hoping to begin localization of SUMO no later than October for those locales who want to participate. To help make this process easier, there will be a staging area for localized content before the support.mozilla.com platform is launched in your locale. If you want to get involved, please contact me at jt at mozilla dot com.

What if I don’t just want to translate? We know that there are some support issues that are unique to particular locales. We also know that different locales have different ways of approaching technical support. Mozilla wants to ensure that all of our volunteers have the correct information so that they can figure out the best way to share that content with users in your locale.

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