Mozilla l20n — Translate Toolkit 1.13.0 documentation

# Mozilla l20n

L20n is a proposed method for localisation in the Mozilla project. https://wiki.mozilla.org/L20n

## Comments

Here we collect some comments about the possibility of l20n support in our tools.

Our tools are based on the idea of units. Each unit has an associated (source, target) pair, possibly containing more, like comments, state, etc. We prefer to build our richer tools against bilingual formats like PO Files, XLIFF, Qt .ts, etc. and provide converters to these formats when we want to support guide/monolingual formats. Pootle also implements its own bilingual format in its database.

l20n is based on the idea of entity soup, or object soup. Files are (at least in the first iteration) monolingual, and each language defines a set of objects which can contain one or more presentation forms of an entity/string, to vary it according to gender, case, declension, plural, time of day, etc. A language can define extra entities to help in constructing others by “factoring out” things, if you will. The structure of each object is left to the programmer for the target language to define.

### Findings

Our tools work on the principle of units. A unit being in its simplest form a source to target mapping, in other words the English source text plus the target translation make a unit. Our code has, for a long time now, a good understanding of units that don’t have a one to one mapping. In PO those are plural units. This is where N source strings map to M target strings. We currently only have 1-M and 2-M mappings for Qt and PO files. l20n introduces N-M mappings which we don’t currently support.

l20n is of course working around an idea of translation objects not strings. But I think the string metaphor works in most cases to ease explanation.

The closest thing we have to this is plural support by means of multistrings.

l20n is pretty powerful with the ability to arbitrarily make up functions/macros that then map to the correct string to use in the translation. In PO the number of possible (plural) strings is mapped before you begin, l20n potentially has any arbitrary mapping.

We could write a simple converter to another format for simple string based objects without further structure, but that doesn’t expose the power of l20n yet, and doesn’t handle complexity in the source text if it was present.

### Issues

- N-M mapping. We need to support arbitrary mappings between source and target
- Determining N and M on the fly. We need to have the ability to determine N and M in real time. So that would mean being able to read l20n files and determine what function is used, then determine how many possible results that function can return. We’d do that for both source and target. Thus we’d get N and M counts which we can use in the interface.
- GUI for Pootle/Virtaal to allow dynamic source and target numbers. We already adapt to N and M on both platforms, but doing this on the fly is harder.
  - If we assume that functions are implemented once in a common library and named the same (for example for plural support) then this is easy.
  - If functions are arbitrarily implemented per target file but at least named the same then this is harder.
  - If names of functions are changed then we’d need to present the ability to change the function that a translator would use in their translation. How to do this so that it isn’t confusing would require quite some thought.
  - Being able to write functions on the fly within the translation tool would most likely be the ultimate ability. We suspect we won’t need to address that level just yet.
- Backend file store. We have two options.
  - Covert to a bilingual store – this is what we do in moz2po.
  - Support monolingual stores – we can do that in Pootle, but it needs wider testing. In Virtaal we do automatic conversion to bilingual formats, but is is currently disabled. To enable this so that we can rely on it we’d need some work on both Pootle and Virtaal; in testing and in managing source and target files changes reliably.
- More complex l20n interactions. These start pushing the translation tool into an IDE but would include:
  - A translator making a 1-1 into a 1-M (to add gender, vary on the time of day, platform, etc). Since no functions are present in the source we’d need to have access to a library of functions or have a structured object editor.
  - A translator might want to define a local entity (an entity which is not in the original source document), or it might be there from before.
- Still needs some thought on how to do anything meaningful with our current translation features like TM, MT, quality checks.

### Approach

The problems above really highlight the approach we’d take to implement l20n in our tools.

- Expand the toolkit to do N-M mapping
- Include l20n parser to allows N and M mapping determination on the fly
- Convert to an interim store. Before tackling the monoligual side we’d look at converting to an interim store to reduce the risks. We’d determine what to use at the time. The only thing certain is that it would not be PO, as PO can’t do N source strings.
- GUI changes. This would be to allow N and M to change dynamically. But we’d limit this to at first relying on 1-1 mappings of functions. Thus plural() in source means plural() in target.

At this point we have a usable translation tool for l20n. The next steps would be about making that support more robust. Each of these would really be determined closer to the time.

- Adaptable N and M. First allowing functions within a file to adapt the values of N and M.
- GUI selection of functions. Ability to select functions from within the GUI.
- Monolingual on the fly. We’d then look at the monolingual side of things. This would be so that we can work on the source and target without the need for the interim store.

We’re now really at a position where we’ve solved things up to point 4 above. Addressing issues in point 5 and 6 would be the next steps.