Eight new locales shipping in Firefox 3.0.2

I’ve been mentioning this a lot during Mozilla Weekly Meetings, but with the upcoming release of Firefox 3, we will be shipping eight new locales as “beta” version.  Eight!  That’s a big number and I’ll explain why below.  But first, if you’re wondering what “beta” means, it’s simply a distinction we give to locales that are very close to being fully localized, but will be tweaked a bit in future minor updates.

Pike resolved bug 450655 which updates shipped-locales for the new beta versions that will be going out in Firefox 3.0.2.  We will be adding the following (I’ve linked to Wikipedia descriptions of each language if you are unfamiliar):

• Bengali (bn-IN)
• Hindi (hi-IN)
• Kannada (kn)
• Marathi (mr)
• Telugu (te)
• Galician (gl)
• Icelandic (is)
• Thai (th)

I visited Wikipedia page to find the low-end number of people in the world who speak these languages.  By adding these eight locales, over 1.2 billion people who might one day access the Web can do so through a localized version of Firefox. Staggering!!

Of course, it’s not fair to use this metric because a much smaller percentage of that great number has access to the Internet.  Luckily, Gerv constructed a model that he blogged about some weeks back that I found helpful in determining percentage of the Internet population covered by Firefox 3.  We can now see the impact of adding new languages to Firefox 3 through Gerv’s model.  Thanks, Gerv.  With the addition of these localizations, Firefox 3’s coverage of the Internet population grew from 88.64% to 93.10%. That is also an amazing jump!

(As I mentioned above, this is based on a rough model constructed by Gerv that we presented at the Mozilla Summit.  We make a lot of assumptions and the data is incomplete, but Gerv has explained his methodolgy in his post.  I’m looking to improve this model going forward so we can be even more accurate.  It’s close, but not perfect.  Ping me if you’re interestd in helping.)

Regardless of the numbers, this was a heroic effort by the community of localizers and by the l10n-drivers team.  You’ll find me passing out congratulations when it’s deserved, so I would like to acknowlege the following people for this effort:

L10n-drivers team:

• Axel Hecht (Pike on IRC) — he probably won’t tell you, but he didn’t sleep much at all over the past couple weeks, working very hard to make this happen.  Amazing work by Pike.
• Mic Berman — Steadily guided localizers through the Web services components of these browsers
• Pascal Chevrel — Great work on managing the web parts of the localization process
• Wil Clouser — Always helping with web dev and clarifying bugs when possible
• Chris Hofmann — Answer questions, keeping up enthusiasm, and developing the community of localizers
• Tim Riley and the QA team — Testing away to perfection…

Localizers “and team”:

• Bengali:  Runa B and the team
• Hindi:  Rajesh and team
• Kannada:  Shankar and team
• Marathi:  Sandeep and gang
• Telugu:  Krishna and the team
• Galician:  Javier et al.
• Icelandic:  Kristján and team
• Thai:  Isriya, Patipat, Arthit and everyone

It’s probably goes without saying, but for me, it’s hard to describe the amount of work and coordination that goes into this process.  Everyone has put in such a great effort to make this happen.  If you’re out having a pint of your beverage of choice, please offer a toast to these people because they deserve it.  Congrats to everyone!

44 locales in 4 days

When Firefox goes through a major update, our teams work on how to communicate that update to our users.  The message tells users why, what’s better, and what to do.  As you may know, greater than 50% of our users are not using the English-U.S. version of our browser, so you can imagine the importance of localizing that eventual message that hits the end-user.

On Monday evening (Pacific time), Pascal filed bug 451128, requesting that our localizers translate strings for the major update “billboard” that we push to end-users for the major update from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3.

Today, Pascal resolved that bug as fixed.  In four short days, our community translated the strings for 44 different locales.  Pascal’s comment in the thread is a nice celebration of the hard work that went into this effort:

“With this last translation, we have completed the task for 44 locales in 4 days! Congrats to all of you…”

Perhaps that’s not enough emphasis or thanks, so let me also chime in with a huge thank you to the localizers and to Pascal for managing the process!

How to improve?

With this acknowlegment, it also seems best to mention some areas where Mozilla can improve to make the process better for localizers so that next time it’s not such a crunch.  I thought of two areas specifically related to this last effort:

• Timing:  Although our community completed this in four days, it would be nice if we can give our localizers the work to be translated with much more time in advance.
• Details:  We should hammer out small details (like iframe window sizes so teams translating know what they have to work with when translating) and communicate that early.

Did I miss other points?

One of our team’s quarterly goals is to draft an l10n requirements document that we will pass over to the development team.  Bits of information like the above will go into that document.  As we get closer to writing that document, I’ll be sure to call for ideas.  How can we make the process better as it relates to what we can communicate to our development team?  Your comments are welcome.

But, just to reiterate Pascal’s point, thank you to all the localizers.   What a terrific effort!

Localization team directory

Ever wonder who and where our volunteer localization teams are across the globe?

Take a look.

This is a list of localizations in our Mozilla ecosystem, with contributors and who “owns” what on each of the teams.  I spent some time yesterday updating this page (same as above) yesterday.

If you are a localizer, feel free to take a look and make edits where necessary.  We should make sure this is as up-to-date as possible, so if you think there should be a change, please do so.

This post is meant mainly for localizers, so I will cross-post it on the dev-l10n mailing list.  But, I thought I would share it with Planet Mozilla.

Localization Bugs Resolved Incomplete

Yesterday, Axel and I (and a few others) went through several lingering registration bugs that needed attention from our team.  I think we covered just under 40 outstanding bugs and came up with responses that we should provide over the upcoming days.

This is more of our effort to improve communication with localizers and to eliminate the number of outstanding bugs that have not had activity or are waiting for a response from someone on the l10n-drivers team at Mozilla Corporation.  We decided to resolve a number of bugs as “incomplete” where individuals had not responded to pings for several months (and in some cases, over one year).

I inserted the following note in each bug to the localizers:

“Hello:  Due to the lack of recent activity on this bug, we are going to resolve it as “incomplete”.  If you choose to restart translation activity, then no problem at all.  Please notify the l10n-drivers team using the l10n mailing list (dev-l10n@lists.mozilla.org) and file a new bug in Bugzilla.  That bug should indicate that you are interested in translating the upcoming version of Firefox, which is 3.1 right now.  All the best, SethB”

Here is a list of the lanaguages and bugs I committed as incomplete:

301564 [ig-NG] Igbo: Firefox, Thunderbird
309575 [ky-KG] Kyrgyz: Thunderbird
370204 [gsc] Aranese: Firefox
398393 [ti] Tigrigna: Firefox
407543 [ht] Haitian creole: Firefox
412994 [kk] Kazakh: Firefox

Over the next few days, I will be working on pinging many individuals who have filed registration bugs, but have had recent activity.  Most likely, we will ask these individuals to participate in the upcoming localization of Firefox 3.1.  Obviously, a lot has to be done before any of the localizers need to worry about translating the next major release of the browser.  (for one, we need to get builds and tinderboxen set up…)  But, we intend to start the communication process with the new teams who seem interested in participating in the upcoming release.