Who are Locale Leaders?

Being a SUMO locale leader is a fun and rewarding task. You help coordinate with your community the work around SUMO, motivate contributors, review articles, onboard new localizers and help contributors grow.

You don't have to do all of this - just translating and reviewing is already great – but building a healthy and fun community around you will help you get the work done faster and will bring you the joy of collaboration and perhaps new friends.

So, what do you need to know?

If you started your locale at SUMO, you have technically been a Locale Leader with your very first contribution. Not everyone is interested in being a Locale Leader from the start, though – this page should help you decide whether you can (and want to) become one.

Above all, being a Locale Leader is a great exercise in organization, leadership, and communication.

As a Locale Leader, you are encouraged to keep localizing and contributing new revisions to the KB. This way, you will learn from your own work and the work of others.

As a Locale Leader, you will have a chance to:

• Greet new members of the SUMO community who want to localize into your language
• Work together with other Locale Leaders and Reviewers on guiding all Editors in their work:
  • through 1:1 mentoring on language and quality
  • through documentation (for example, a Style Guide for your locale)
• Help organize and attend regional and global Mozilla events
• Communicate with and be a part of the global localization community
• Provide fair reviews of contributions provided by all Editors in your locale – and provide constructive feedback on their quality, which includes:
  • Approving good revisions and encouraging Editors to continue their great work
  • Rejecting revisions that can be improved, and letting their authors know what and why could be better

What skills can you practice and develop as a Locale Leader?

• Localizing for the web, between English and your target (native) locale
• Ensuring quality for online localization
• Managing projects remotely (and directly)
• Communicating asynchronously for collaborative and creative goals
• Mentoring others remotely/directly
• Coordinating an online community of like-minded people

State of your locale

It's important that you know how your locale is doing. Your best friend in finding out quickly is the dashboard, where you see the localization coverage, the articles needing translation and review. You can find your dashboard from the “contributors tools” menu on the top, or you can visit the page directly.

On the Dashboard you can find some very useful links on the left side:

• Locale metrics: shows you the metrics over time, so that you can understand how your locale has been doing and how many contributors have been active historically.
• Localization team: here you will see the team and each member's roles and activities. As a locale leader you will be able to grant contributors reviewer rights. This makes it very easy for you to spot newcomers and see who has been active in the past 90 days.
• Recent revisions: here you will be able to see exactly what revisions have been made. You will be able to refine your search by username and date range.
• Aggregated metrics: here you will be able to see how your locale is doing compared to others.

What should your goals be?

The goals below are listed in an order you can easily follow to localize SUMO for those who speak your language.

KB Goals

1. Firefox FAQ page localized
2. 50% of templates localized
3. 100% of templates localized
4. Top 20 KB articles localized (global)
5. Top 50 KB articles localized (global)
6. Top 100 KB articles localized (global)
7. Top 20 KB articles localized (Firefox)
8. Top 50 KB articles localized (Firefox)
9. Top 100 KB articles localized (Firefox)
10. Top 20 KB articles localized (Firefox for Android)
11. Top 50 KB articles localized (Firefox for Android)
12. Top 20 KB articles localized (Firefox for iOS)
13. Top 50 KB articles localized (Firefox for iOS)

UI Goals

1. 10% or more of UI localized
2. 20% or more of UI localized
3. 30% or more of UI localized
4. 40% or more of UI localized
5. 50% or more of UI localized
6. 60% or more of UI localized
7. 70% or more of UI localized
8. 80% or more of UI localized
9. 90% or more of UI localized

If you “hit a milestone” feel free to tell the other teams – thanks!

If you have questions about the priorities for your locale, please reach out to us in the l10n forum and we will clarify the situation.

Style Guides

You can find Mozilla's main style guides for all supported locales on this page.

What is a style guide?

A style guide is a set of standards for the writing and design of documents, either for general use or for a specific publication, organization or field. A style guide establishes and enforces to improve communication. To do that, it ensures and enforces best practice in usage and in language composition, visual composition, orthography, and typography. (See Wikipedia article and Mozilla wiki best practices for SUMO.)

A SUMO style guide is a document that gathers all linguistic standards for a SUMO locale, created and accepted by the Locale Leaders and Reviewers. It is a set of guidelines and tips for all localizers – new and experienced – in the context of the type of content that SUMO presents in its many available locales.

A style guide is the document that everyone using a locale should refer to. It is the golden standard of localization for the locale.

It is possible that your locale already has a style guide created by localizers who worked in your language before you.

It is also possible that you will be involved in creating a style guide from scratch! It is not a trivial task, but it helps everyone who starts to localize the project after it is created. Creating a style guide is a responsibility of the Locale Leaders and Reviewers.

How to create a style guide

Locale Leaders and Reviewers should cooperate online to make the style guide as broad and definitive as possible. It is a good idea to take an existing style guide (for example from a different project) and base your own style guide on it.

Languages are processes, rather than mathematical constants - so, a style guide should be open for reviews and updates by the community using it, if necessary.

A style guide should be written in the target (native) locale, so that all localizers can understand what it contains, even if they are not experts in the source (English) locale.

What should a style guide include? Some of the categories of information included in a style guide should be:

• Common types of text – The most popular types of text that are to be localized following the rules of this style guide. SUMO texts are generally divided into two broad categories:
  • “How to” articles - explaining features and options of Mozilla-powered software.
  • “Troubleshooting” articles - explaining common or unusual problems encountered while using the software and proposing solutions to them.
• Terminology – An explanation of the terms and concepts present in the source and their counterparts in target locales; may include a list of “false friends” (terms that you think mean one thing, but actually mean another). SUMO terminology is mostly based on the terms gathered in the Transvision tool.
• Code in the text – An explanation of how code in the text looks like and what should (and should not) be done with it. For example, at SUMO this will include options for displaying different content to different platform configurations (also known as the for tags).
• Acronyms and abbreviations – All the tricky vocabulary shortcuts we love to use in IT. IYKWIM ;-)
• Capitalization – Which words are Capitalized. Some terms could even be ALL CAPS!
• Dates & numbers – Different locales use different formats for dates and numbers. For example 03/04/15 means a different thing to someone from USA, and someone from Spain.
• Whitespaces – The way different parts of text are separated by empty spaces (for example: paragraphs, images, headings).
• General spelling, grammar, and punctuation – General rules about spelling, grammar, and punctuation in the locale. The basics everyone should know by heart, but that is better to have written down for reference.

How to build a community

Building a community is a great way to reach all your goals at SUMO and having a lot of fun while doing it. Some great friendships were born here, so you might end up having a lot of friends. Building a healthy community is an art that gets interpreted very differently by everyone. We'll give you some ideas and tools, you can use the ones that adapt the best to your style:

• Be friendly: being friendly is one of the easiest and most effective ways to build a community and encourage people to help. Simple phrases like "hello", "thank you", and "great to see you again" are really powerful.
• Create helpful materials: this will make it easier for new contributors to get started. Creating a style guide/glossary and sharing best tips with all other localizers will also help you, and make the whole community better.
• Reward contributors: telling other contributors how great they are in private and public is a great way to motivate them and show appreciation. You can ask for swag from the SUMO team as well! Feel free to reach out to us in the l10n forum.
• Organize events: organizing events online or offline is a great way to get to know your community better and get an extra boost of motivation to achieve a goal. You will find the information to request swag and support for the event on our wiki page.
• Communicate: use your country / region Mozilla site, language or regional mailing lists, your locale's forum thread, chat or video calls, Telegram groups… – anything that works for you and other members of the community to make working together easier and more fun.