Firefox 3 Sinhala Release on Swarnavahini News

Danishka is our lead Sinhala localizer in Sri Lanka.  In addition to creating a localized version of Firefox 3, he’s been doing some great evangelizing about Mozilla in his home country.  Check out this video on Swarnavahini News.  (If you don’t understand Sinhala, this video is gonna be rough.  But, you’ll still see some noticeable logos and hear some familiar names.)

Firefox 3 Sinhala Release on Swarnavahini News

Danishka, how’d you do it?  It’s so impressive that you localized the browser AND have been creating such great buzz in your country.  Very cool!!

More news on impact out of Colombo.

Many thanks to our friends at the Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) and the University of Moratuwa who helped Danishka in this great effort. 

I would love to hear any thoughts from our community in Sri Lanka.  How you are expanding?  How did you find the localization process?   What tools did you use?  Please give us your comments.  I know others would be interested in reading.

Reviewing l10n goals

Last week, a subset of the l10n-drivers team met in Paris (my pics are coming) to discuss many things related to l10n, including a review of goals that had been set last November before the lead-up to the release of Firefox 3.  The goals were ambitious and listed many ways in which the team could create positive impact.  Part of our work week was to review these goals and find out what we did well, didn’t do well, and could do better as we create goals for the upcoming quarter.

One thing to note for this post, I’ve tried to distill lots and lots of goals (sometimes, they were simply tasks) into larger buckets that represent common themes among the ideas that came up.  I’ve tried to list what was done well and what needs improvement for the goals that were created.

Goal 1:  Create a finite schedule that localizers could follow as they worked up to the release of Firefox 3 and Thunderbird

How did we do?  Well, we did the following:

• Improved the build infrastructure using L10n server
• Created a dashboard that shows state of locales and outstanding bug
• Started filing tracking bugs for each locale interested in shipping FF3

We could improve by getting better at time management of certain aspects of localization that become obsolete (specifically web stuff), so our localizer community does not working fruitlessly to translate something that is then not used.

Goal 2: L10n team implements more strategic initiatives that benefit the Mozilla Community

How’d it go?

We worked hard on the following:

• Proactively developing and supporting community
• Contributing to marketing/analysis/metrics teams
• Create tools for the l10n community
• Improve communication about the localization process so people can plan more efficiently

Overall, we did pretty well here and can continue to improve. For community development, we had hoped to find new, motivated individuals to join teams and help lead, create opportunities for localizers to grow into new marketing and PR roles if interested, and to encourage localizers to help Mozilla understand local initiatives, goals, and even trends taking place.  Essentially, we want to build good relationships with localizers.  The trouble with this is that it’s hard to measure and it’s an ongoing process.  So, we couldn’t really find concrete examples, but are starting new initiatives like the Community Pack, which I’ll describe below.

Regarding metrics, Ken Kovash’s blog has a lot of information about locale specific use of Firefox.   We hope to grow more here and do more with Ken so our localizers have more information about the impact they are having.

Tools development also had some success.  We are made a grant to Translate.org.za for their work on Pootle.  Wil Clouser and Dan Schafer have been working very hard on Verbatim.  We also held a tools BoF at FOSDEM.  We chatted with Narro Project several times and Narro opened its code for all to see and contribute.  More work will continue on tools development throughout the coming year.

From a QA/testing perspective, we did the following:

• Provided better, more timely feedback when comparing the en-US trunk vs. localizer’s code
• Used Axel’s compare-locales tool to test more bugs
• Developed a screenshoot tool which goes through preference dialogues and enables a bunch of screenshots and tell everyone what the dialogue sizes are.  (By the way, Pike ran all this manually.  What a job!)

We can improve by providing more support to new localizers.  Zbigniew Braniecki is spearheading one idea that he calls the Community Pack that will be a list of resources available for the community.  We also need to enhance our testing tools for localizers.

Goal 3:  Mozilla’s localization-drivers team define its role and scope in the Mozilla Corporation and in the Mozilla Community, answering the questions “What are the l10n-drivers? What do they do?  And, how can they help us?”

How’d we do?

We probably could have done a lot better here, but the good thing is that the team is focusing its goals for the upcoming quarter and, through my blog and other outlets, we’ll be much more transparent and communicative about what we are doing.

I mentioned it last post…you may have noticed that I’m writing more and more about l10n.  Well, there is a reason.  I’ve been asked to change my role at Mozilla and take on more leadership with our localization efforts.  I will continue to work with community to provide very leveraged support with the Community Giving and Empowerment Program.  However, that experience and my involvement with the Evangelism team gave me a lot more exposure to things like the l10n community.   Now, I’ll be working on the l10n team to improve our process, blog more to provide transparency and showcase ideas and progress, and work hard to build new l10n communities while servicing our existing localizers who do so much.  Hooray!  I couldn’t be more excited.  And, I am so honored to work with all of the localizers in our community who make it possible for our software to ship in so many languages.