Hello Localizers,
The Firefox Relay team is going to land a major update in Pontoon, containing more than 100 strings. Some are new but a majority of them are revised due to changes to the following terms:
- An “alias” is now called a “mask”
- A “real email” is now called a “true email”
- “Subdomain" consistently throughout, rather than “domain”
- A few strings that are only visible to screen readers, who will have better support soon.
The reason to change the term from alias to mask is that the Relay team is looking to support and connect with more people and make privacy more accessible. Currently, our terminology in product is highly technical and the team has found that there is a disconnect between many users and the content that the product has been using. This is part of a wider effort to do a content refresh after the team found various issues in user research. Additional user research was done on alias and masking and masking performed better compared to alias and got the message across and connected in a better way with users.
Currently, the strings containing the older terms are marked as “deprecated”. The reason for keeping them and not removing them completely in this update is so that they can remain in use until the new strings are available in more locales. These strings will be removed after the updates are mostly localized/caught up, hopefully not too long after the next release.
Before localizing the updated strings, it might be best to discuss within each locale how these new terms should be translated or localized. This will ensure the consistency of the expressions across the product. For some languages, the change may not make any difference one way or another, but it’s up to each community to reach that decision with careful consideration.
If you have already localized the strings containing the old expressions, your work is not wasted. They will appear in the Machinery tab in Pontoon as translation memory, which makes updating the new strings a bit faster.
If you have not translated the deprecated strings, skip them. It’s easy to spot these strings: These are the strings containing alias, aliases, real email, domain or domains (with the exception of this string: Why did my email masks start to use the domain “mozmail.com?”). These strings will be removed after the next release at some point.
The release of these changes is April 19th. Do the best you can to meet the deadline. If by release date, you are not able to complete, we have some other releases planned for shortly after, so strings that are submitted after the 19th hopefully won’t take too long to appear on the website as well.
Thank you very much for your continuous effort and contribution.