[Mozilla] Fwd: [l10n-web] mozilla.org: Please keep the home page localization up to date

[Pascal Chevrel]

Le 10/11/2015 09:44, Eduard Gamonal a écrit :
> Bon dia,
> Una recomanació del flod per mantenir-nos al dia
> 

Bon dia :)

If you don't mind, I'll write to the list in English (or French or
Castillan if you prefer, just tell me), I haven't practiced Catalan in
years and can't write it anymore, but I can still read it so don't feel
obliged to reply to me in English.

Yes, flod is right, the home page should always be fully translated.
This is where people discover about us and most people never got beyond
that page.

The pages we ask to translate on mozilla.org range from 10 to 50
depending on the scope of your locale (number of users, range of
products localized, projects localized, size of the team...). That's not
a lot of content but that represents probably like 90% of the traffic on
the site, that means that if visitors see these pages in their langauge,
they genuinely think the whole site is actually done.

The home page is also our main marketing tool, we don't own search
engines, video downloading services, social networks or adversitising
networks. We don't have the resources for advertising IRL, like TV
commercials or billboards. Occassionnally we will do one such
advertising and that will burn a lot of our resources.

Mozilla.org home page is our main promotion tool for people that don't
yet use Firefox. And Firefox in-product pages is our main promotion tool
for people that already use our software.

I can't emphasize enough how much it is important that these tools that
do receive massive amounts of visitors need to he a focus for
localiation teams :)

Our resources, both staff and volunteers, are scarse. It might seem big
if we compare it to other small open source projects, but we are not
competing with them, we are competing frontally and brutally with the
biggest IT companies in the world (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Adobe,
Facebook…). They have deep pockets, we don't, we need to pick our
battles and energy where it has most impact.

Of course, volunteers are always free to choose whatever project they
want to focus on at Mozilla, even if it is considered as very marginal
(Seamonkey for example), that's also why we tend to also talk about core
volunteers that do share our goals and desire for impact and that agree
to put a special focus on shipping and promoting to the masses
(essentially Firefox and mozilla.org). In short, libre software
hacktivists that are also hightly pragmatist.

It took us (mainly flod and myself) considerable effort to make l10n a
first-class citizen in www.mozilla.org ober the years, it would be very
sad to have to get back to the old days when we had to scale back to a
handful of locales only instead of the 80+ we have now just because we
can't sustain a community around it.

Cheers

Pascal

PS: and yes, I did subscribe formally to the list this time ;)