Localizing extension metadata on addons.mozilla.org

AMO supports localized metadata for each extension. This data describes the extension, and doesn't necessarily change with each revision (but it can). The localizable data fields of an extension are:

  • Name
  • Homepage
  • Summary
  • Description
  • EULA
  • Privacy Policy
  • Version Notes
  • Developer Comments

When you submit a new extension to AMO, the process is divided into several steps.

In step 2, you'll be asked to provide the attributes listed above in the add-on's default locale (selected in step 1). The values you provide here are used as fallback values if someone requests a language that doesn't exist.

Step 4 allows you to translate any of the above fields into any other language AMO supports. Remember, all fields are optional when localizing. Any field that is blank will just show up in the default locale.

Getting translation help

You are kindly advised NOT to use any automatic online translation, which can bring unpleasant low-quality output to users. Always prefer a qualified human translation.

AMO doesn't directly provide translation assistance to extension authors, but there are a couple services that can help:

BabelZilla.org

BabelZilla.org is a community dedicated to the localization of extensions for Moz family apps. They are volunteer translators from all over the world and are maintaining translations for more than 400 extensions with an online translation system. They also provide help for adding a localization support to your extension if there is no localization structure yet. You can already request for AMO fields localization on the forums, and these fields will be added soon to the Web Translation System.

Amazon Mechanical Turk

This is not free, but for a very modest amount of money you can get your AMO page quickly translated by native speakers. Create an account and then, using the “Basic Open-ended Question” template, follow the instructions to upload the text of your AMO page. On the Properties page you can specify the location of the worker in order to restrict to people living in the country where the language is spoken. The Reward is up to you, but $5-10 per translation seems to work well.

Localization codes

AMO offers 33 localizations, including English. Here is a list of the codes:

Arabic (ar), Catalan (ca), Czech (cs), Danish (da), German (de), Greek (el), Basque (eu), Spanish (es-ES), Farsi (fa), Finnish (fi), French (fr), Gaeilge (ga-IE), Hebrew (he), Hungarian (hu), Indonesian (id), Italian (it), Japanese (ja), Korean (ko), Mongolian (mn), Dutch (nl), Polish (pl), Brazilian Portuguese (pt-BR), European Portuguese (pt-PT), Romanian (ro), Russian (ru), Slovakian (sk), Albanian (sq), Swedish (sv-SE), Ukrainian (uk), Vietnamese (vi), Chinese (zh-CN) and Taiwanese (zh-TW).

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 Contributors to this page: bunnybooboo, teoli, trevorh, mcramer, Fredchat, Goofy, Clouserw, Fligtar, AxelHecht
 Last updated by: bunnybooboo,