• 44 locales in 4 days

    August 22nd, 2008 by seth bindernagel with 6 comments »

    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!