How Similar Are your Spanish Localizations? A Data-driven Analysis

Track: Engage Global Users | EG11 |
Thursday, January 28, 2021, 11:00am – 11:30am
Held in: Stream 1
Presenter:
Kekoa Riggin - Mozilla

In 2019, Mozilla began a case study to determine the degree of difference between Firefox localizations into our four Spanish regional variants. The intent was to evaluate whether to reduce the number of these variants of Firefox. To accomplish this, a number of methods for measuring linguistic proximity between localizations were used, including BLEU scores. What started as an attempt to reduce duplicate localization efforts turned into identifying the minimal effort needed to expand coverage from one regional variant to the next. In this session we will explore the process used in this project and discuss how companies can apply similar processes to reduce costs when expanding language coverage into new regional variants.

Takeaways: Attendees will learn how Mozilla (an open source project) evaluates localization shipping criteria; that expanding into new regional variants can be a low-investment way to capture related markets; and the process for identifying low-hanging fruit.