Localizing Firefox 3: Post 1 in a series about l10n
June 3rd, 2008 by seth bindernagel
Maybe you’ve noticed, but our Evangelism team and many others have written blog posts about the efforts that have gone into the development of Firefox 3. For instance, you may have seen posts from the following people:
- Deb Richardson who has been blogging about the amazing new features in Firefox;
- Mark Finkle blogging about Firefox 3 Parental Controls and native JSON parsing;
- Gen Kanai writing about UTF-8 support in the Awesome Bar
Over the next few days, I’ll be linking to posts written by three of our localizers who I asked to blog about their experience localizing Firefox 3. I tried to find three people who represented distinct areas of localization. I asked them to tell us about their work, a bit about themselves, interesting challenges they faced along the way, and any other stuff they wanted to mention.
First up is Friedel Wolff. You’ll remember Friedel as the lead tools developer of the Translate Toolkit. Additionally, he works on localizing Firefox in Afrikaans.
I’ll let him tell the rest of the story…
Of course, if you have a story to share, ping me or comment in this blog.
Some fellow Firefox translators have asked us how quickly we got our Tinderbox green (i.e. Firefox is building without errors); since we only started updating our translation in March.
5 minutes
I don’t think anyone believes me though!
But honestly that’s how long it takes to convert our PO files from old version to new and then to pump those back to the Mozilla format files.
It does take me about 2-3 hours to review all the changes and check them into Mozilla CVS. But I’m almost 100% sure what I check in are correct, bugs that break builds are problems with the tools which we then fix.
This whole process allows us to focus clearly on the translation and not get bogged down in the technical process.