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 projects, 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.
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.
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).
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: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/styleguide/identity/firefox/branding/. 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.