Inngangur
Style guides define the standard against which we determine a translation's quality. They contain rules that are both defined by Mozilla and by Mozilla's localization communities on how to best translate text in Mozilla products, websites, and other projects. Style guides are used to both translate and evaluate a translation's quality. By following these rules, a translator has a better chance of producing a high quality translation that represents Mozilla values and culture. Some examples of international style guides created by other organizations are:
This style guide is broken up into two main parts: the first contains rules that are language-specific and must be defined by each Mozilla l10n community (covering language-specific style, terminology, and units); the second contains general rules that Mozilla has defined for translators of all languages that can help you translate well (covering principles of accuracy and fluency). Please adapt part one of this style guide to your l10n community's rules for style, terminology, and units. Wherever possible, refer to existing national standards for units, spelling, and grammar in your community's adaptation of the first part of this style guide.
Language-specific Mozilla style
Gagnlegir hlekkir
Ritreglur Árnastofnunar
Orðabók.is
Tölvuorðabók Skýrslutæknifélags Íslands
Style
Your localization community's style is largely up to you to define. It is a part of your community's instructions and standards for translating strings within each project type. Style encompasses various elements, such as formality, tone, natural expression, handling cultural references, idioms, or slang, and maintaining consistency with Mozilla and 3rd party branding and style guides. Your localization community should define these style elements for localizing Mozilla projects into your language. Let's go through these main aspects of Style.
When determining the formality or tone of a Mozilla l10n project in your language, ask yourself these questions:
- Who is the target user for this project and what is their background?
- How would a target user for this project expect to interact with this project? For example, would they expect a friendly, casual interaction?
- Is formal language appropriate for all of your language's Mozilla l10n projects, or only some of them? Which ones?
- Is informal language appropriate for all of your language's Mozilla l10n projets, or only some of them? Which ones?
In fact, localization should not use a level of formality higher or lower than required by this community-defined style guideline. An example of this would be using "click here" (not formal) vs. "please click here" (more formal). Also, the tone employed throughout a l10n project(s) should stay consistent within itself.
Natural expression
Using natural expressions make your localization sound natural to a native speaker. If your translation does not follow the community defined language guidelines for translating content that contains local or natural expressions, this results in a mediocre and/or awkward translation. Teams should be careful to address those and keep them in mind while translating, which is why it is an important section to address in a Style Guide. An example of a natural expression in a translation would be translating the Spanish phrase, "En ocho días." In English, one might translate this as, "in eight days" or "in a week." The latter is the more natural translation, although both could be considered correct.
In this section, form guidelines for how to perform a natural sounding localization. This might take some time and experience to find the right examples to include or create the right guidelines for your language.
Handling cultural references, idioms, and slang
Cultural references, idioms, and slang require a full understanding of these references between the cultures of your source and target languages. An example of a cultural reference in English would be the phrase, "kick-off meeting." This is a reference that uses an American football term. It means a meeting to begin a project. To translate it, you can follow one of two approaches:
- Find an equivalent reference phrase in your language.
- Remove the cultural reference and translate the core meaning (e.g., "a commencement meeting")
Define a policy for handling these cultural references, idioms, and slang that you can make standard across all projects. Consider resources you can refer back to in order to find cultural equivalents and list them in this section of your style guide (e.g., a slang dictionary in your language).
Style consistency
Finally, adherence to Mozilla and third-party branding and style guides should be respected throughout a localization project. More information on Mozilla-specific branding rules can be found here: <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/styleguide/identity/firefox/branding/">https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/styleguide/identity/firefox/branding/</a>. For example, some brand names should never be translated, such as "Firefox". For other brands that do not have any branding guidelines, your localization community must define whether to translate them. Be extra careful to check on branding rules before deciding to translate a name or not (whether for Mozilla or for a third-party) and to list them here in your community's l10n style guide.
Terminology
Here are a few existing term bases we approve of for software/internet terminology and definitions (though not limited to):
You should be consistent in the use of existing reliable appropriate term bases in your language. These term bases could be developed and approved by the community, or leveraged from another party that adhere to national, international or local standards for software and internet terminology. Avoid the following:
- Inconsistent use of terminology within the project
- Inconsistent use of terminology with term base
- Inconsistent use of terminology across all of your projects
- Using terminology from another subject matter (e.g., don't use medical terminology in Firefox).
Tips on translating difficult concepts
Translating terms representing difficult concepts is a tricky task. Here are some ideas to help you translate terms that do not have equivalents in your language:
Developing new term bases
What is your community's process for identifying and creating a new termbase? Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Avoid overly borrowing English expressions
- Referencing another language from the same language family may inspire you to come up with your own terms
- Consider the product target audience (age, level of literacy, education, social and economic status)
- Will you use loan words from another language or coin new terms in your language to maintain language purity? Is there government requirement or policy to encourage creating new terms for new concepts, or will loan words be sufficient to reach broader masses and expedite new technology adoption?
- If there are two acceptable scripts commonly used by the general public, what is the commonly used script on the web or government sites? What is the script used by major web technology companies?
Units and Grammar
Many elements of unit or grammar do not exist or apply to all languages. If you find one of these elements that does not apply to your language, please remove it from your style guide. For those definitions of units and grammar that apply document the reference used or how it will be applied to the translation.
The translation should strive to achieve proper unit conversions for currency, measurements, etc. for the target audience.
Units and Unit Conversion
How are the date formats for weeks and months expressed in the following forms:
- 1). Fully spelled out 2). 2 or 3 letters 3). Single letter
- What is the order of Year, Month and Day?
Calendar view:
- Which date is considered the first day of the week, Sunday or Monday?
- Is Lunar calendar observed? Other regional calendar observed?
How is time expressed in your language? Including 0-24 hr expression, hour, minute and second.
Numerals
How are numerals and percentages expressed in your language?
Example: 1.23 (decimal separator) or 1,000 (thousand separator) using comma or period.
Currency
What are other widely used currency and symbols used in your country/language for paid apps.
Units
Do you use the imperial, metric or nautical system for measuring weight, distance, etc.? Source strings will use the imperial system (e.g., miles, pounds, feet, gallons, etc.). Target translations should convert imperial metrics to their measurement system.
Names
What are the order of family name and given name in your language? Here is the guideline on the naming convention from w3c.org:
Address and Postal Code Format
What is the format in your language?
Example: most Asian countries start from big to small: [Country] [postal code][state/province][city][district][street number and name][building and suite numbers][addressee]
Countries of European languages start from small to big: [addressee][street number and name][building and suite numbers][district][city][state/province][postal code][Country]
Space separators between digits can be different for area codes such as State (Province) and City,
Spelling And Grammar Checks
Many languages have national or international standards that define spelling and grammar rules. When defining these rules for your community, make reference to those standards wherever possible. Do you have automated tests for spell checking and grammar? List those tools and dictionaries here and how regularly they should be used.
Tense
Pluralization
Abbreviations
How are abbreviations expressed in your language?
Example, in English, abbreviations are made by removing most vowels and only using the first 3-5 consonants followed by a period (e.g., abbreviation = abbr.). (see: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbreviation%29">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbreviation)</a>
If your language does not have a standard way of expressing abbreviations, do you simply leave them in English?
Acronyms
Punctuation
Do you use different punctuation rules in your Firefox localization than what your language standard defines?
Example: do you use a period at the end of every user interface element translation or only some? What is the international/national standard for punctuation in your language?
Emphasis
Is there an international/national standard for capitalization in your language?
Hyphens and compounds
Prepositions and articles
What is the appropriate form of expressing prepositions and articles in your language?
Diacritics and Special characters
Quotes
Does your language have a standard use for quotation marks, parenthesis, or brackets?
Whitespace
User Interface Elements
- Titles : Should be brief and precise. Localizers can assume that source content reaches 2/3 of the total available line space. This allows localization text to expand and not be truncated or resolved through ellipsis. Title on the final page (meaning no more click through) should allow enough room to display full text.
- Buttons: Capitalize the first letter of each word. Limit to one or two words. Use verbs that precisely describe the button's action. For example, "Cancel", "Clear History", "Add Email", "Select All", etc.
- Value Selector Lists: Capitalize the first letter of the first word and the first letter of any proper nouns. Limit to one or two words.
- Articles: Avoid them where possible. Articles (such as the word "the" in English) should be avoided wherever possible. User interface elements have limited space available for text. Avoiding articles will help ensure that your translations will be accommodated within the user interface.
- Ellipsis: Ellipsis are often inserted automatically in the UI where strings are truncated. Ellipsis should only be used at high level of UI pages, but not be on the final page (after a series of click-through) where detailed instruction is given. Ellipsis should not be used as a way to solve truncation issue. Focus on making the UI short and precise. The sequence of the sentence structure in another language may not translate well, when a sentence is half finished as such.
General Mozilla l10n style (common to all languages)
Accuracy
Meaning-based translation
When it comes to translation, meaning is everything. A translator needs to understand the source text's meaning exactly. You then find its most closely linked equivalent in your own language, without adding or subtracting meaning in your translation. Finding meaning-based equivalents between languages can be difficult. To help concentrate your thoughts, ask yourself questions like:
- What does this word/sentence/string mean in English?
- What is the message the author is trying to send?
- How would I express that meaning in my own language?
Sometimes translation memory and machine translation tools can offer bad suggestions for a translation. If you use either as part of your translation workflow, make sure to correct the suggestions before submitting them. Avoid literal translation at all costs. Watch out for words that might sound or look the same between English and your language, but have a different meaning.
Should not be translated
Access Keys
Access keys allow a computer to immediately jump to a particular part in a web page by combining keystrokes. They can be adapted to suit your language by selecting a single character to be used in the combined keystroke. Access keys have their own lines within .dtd and .properties files and are identified by being named ".accesskey" in the line.
Variables
Variables should never be translated. You can recognize a variable within a string by its beginning with a specific character (e.g., $, #, %, etc.) followed by a combination of words without spacing. For example, $BrandShortName and %S are variables. You can move a variable around within a string, if the translation of the string requires it.
Brands, copyright, and trademark
Brand names, as well as copyright and trademarks should never be translated, nor transliterated into a non-Latin based script. See the <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/styleguide/communications/translation/">Mozilla branding guide</a> for more details.
Translating culture-specific references
At times there will be English content included in Mozilla products or web projects (e.g., marketing campaigns) that makes references to American culture and concepts. When translating these, it is best to find an equivalent cultural reference within your own culture that accurately conveys the meaning of the English reference. For example, an American might say, "Good job, home run!" A home run is a baseball reference for a successful outcome. An appropriate translation would be an equivalent metaphor within your culture. Using soccer as an example, you might translate "Good job, home run!" into "Good job, nice goal!" in your language.
[Add a note about Mozilla culture.]
Legal content
Mozilla projects will often contain legal content in the form of user agreements, privacy statements, etc. When reviewing the translation of legal content, Mozilla localizers should do so according to the criteria concerning accuracy, fluency, style, and terminology found within this style guide and according to Mozilla culture and values.
Fluency
To produce a fluent translation, not only should the translation follow the language's standard grammar, punctuation, and spelling rules, but it should avoid being ambiguous, incoherent, or inconsistent, and unintelligible.
To avoid ambiguity, the translator must thoroughly understand the meaning behind the source text, including any references that text might include. For example, if the English source text uses the word, "it", the translator must know what "it" is to avoid an ambiguous translation. Clearly understanding the source text will also allow a translator to make the source text's logical connections in their own translation. This helps to keep the translation coherent.
Inconsistency can pop up in many forms. A translator must be consistent in their use of abbreviations, references, and links within each localization project. They must also be consistent with Mozilla and the localization communities' style guides and approved terminology. Abbreviations, like terminology, should come from either a standard reference (like a dictionary of abbreviations) or should follow your language's rules for creating abbreviations. Once used, the abbreviation must remain consistent every place that it is used in the translation. Cross-references (or links) must also be consistently used within a translation. If a text contains a hyperlink URL to a support article in English, the translation should also contain a hyperlink to a translation of that support article (if available) or the English version. Links should not redirect to other pages nor should they be broken and unusable.
Finally, there are times that a translation simply doesn't make sense. It's hard to put your finger on what exactly is wrong with it, but you know it is unintelligible and not fluent. While this is uncommon, it's important to report these unintelligible translations and offer suggestions to correct them.
