Some thoughts on Mozilla l10n

In the past couple days, the Mozilla’s dev-l10n mailing list has seen a thread of conversation asking about how Mozilla chooses languages that are shipped and what can be done to improve the process.  I thought I’d write a bit on the incredibly hard work that goes into localizing and what might constitute plan for Mozilla post Firefox 3.

Mozilla relies on the volunteer contributions from a very dedicated community of localizers who work so hard to meet Mozilla’s standards of perfection.  Contributors who choose to localize work with us to meet that standard and we do the best we can to meet their needs inside the pressures of release cycles.  In fact, I wrote a post about the process several months back and illustrated it with some slides.

The Mozilla process is not perfect, but we hold high standards for user experience and expectations for Mozilla Firefox.  We choose to ship our official, non language-pack locales only when they are ready as a bug-free experience for the end-user. Because of this, the process is very elaborate, detail-oriented, and complex.  (see my linked to post above…)

With the help from those volunteers, we released Firefox 3 in a coordinated effort that included simultaneously shipping official versions of the browser in 46 locales.  Two more are in beta status.  And, 20+ language packs that can be installed in the browser as addons. That is incredible work from around 70 different translation teams.  In fact, over 100 such highly-motivated teams have stepped forward to work at this on Mozilla projects over the last 10 years.

Internet Explorer 7 simultaneously shipped its major release in one locale…English.

Now that Firefox 3 has shipped, Mozilla’s l10n team and its community can focus both on getting new, official translations into the build and release process and on improving the existing process.

One way to think of the release process is like a train leaving a station.  We do our best to try to get everyone to catch the next release train.  Another release train (Firefox 3.0.1) will be leaving the station soon and we will be trying to get more localization aboard.  Volunteers working on localizations come from all over the world.  Brazil, France, Germany, India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, the list goes on and on.  (If I didn’t mention your country, I meant no offense.  You can see all the teams here.)  Those contributors are working hard right now to translate our software in their native languages to make sure they are ready for the the next release.

As we grow as a global project (presently with over 180 million users), we continue to meet so many new contributors.  You might imagine that at times we are overwhelmed with the level of interest from our developer, testing, localizer, and user communities.  What a wonderfully complex challenge that contributors help make work in order to ship in 48 languages.

As the dust settles from shipping Firefox 3, we are eager to increase the number of localizations we ship and improve our process.  It’ll take a strategic plan to make gains in our process and here is a piece of the plan I’d like to see take place:

1. Globally, we reach out to individual localization teams and set up IRC or even telephone meetings,
2. Figure out what is feasible to happen in the next 3-6 months for each translation team,
3. Discuss plans for teams close to finishing translation on Firefox 2.0, Firefox 3.0.x, or Firefox 3.1,
4. Address other agenda items for each team.

What do you think of this plan?  Good idea or bad idea?  Did I miss anything?  If you have agenda points, let me know.  If we set up these team meetings, we can add those points to our list.

Our goal is to get as many localizations that are close to finishing their translation, shipping when/if they can.