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A six month report from Translate.org.za
You may remember that Mozilla made a grant to the team at Translate.org.za this past summer to help improve the translation tools that many of our localizers use to localize Firefox. One of the stipulations of that grant asked Translate to provide a mid-year report summarizing their progress. Many thanks to Friedel (the lead developer at the Translate Toolkit) who submitted it to me today.
Highlights include the following:
- Integrating with Mozilla’s code repository system, Mercurial
- Launching their offline editor Virtaal, which will allow localizers to work on translations when they are unable to access the Web
- Merging Verbatim work by clouserw and dschafer into their trunk. (Wil wrote a very thoughtful piece about the decisions Wil and Mozilla made before choosing to hack on Pootle and how it has gone since then.)
- Migrating to Django, a new web platform for Pootle that should make developer contributions in the future a bit easier
We hope to have two projects integrated into Verbatim by the end of this quarter so localizers can use the tool to translate the UI for both AMO (addons.mozilla.org) and SUMO (support.mozilla.com). This will happen due to the great work by Wil Clouser and the guys at Translate Toolkit.
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L10n in 2010
Amidst all that is going on in our day-to-day related to Mozilla localization, one of the most important things we can do is to think about the future. It’s about this time each quarter that I start to think about the goals for next quarter. What can we do better and where should we focus? Stepping away to do that can be challenging when so much is going on. My hope is that the l10n community will create its goals together for the next quarter. We’ll start that ambitious exercise soon…
…even more ambitious is the undertaking of Mozilla’s chief lizard wrangler. You may have seen Mitchell’s post about the 2010 goal setting process. Mozilla is really trying to push the envelope when it comes to inclusiveness and distributed authority. And, we want everyone in the l10n community to have a chance to provide his or her input on the vision of Mozilla for 2010. When you think of the localization community in the future, what do you envision?
Mitchell lists the following Mozilla-wide goals:
1. Deepen Mozilla’s role as a centerpiece of the Internet
- communities continue to expand and provide means for individual development
- thought leadership expands to include things such as the open web, hybrid social enterprises, organizational sustainability, shared decision-making, individual control, and portability in Internet life
- innovations emerge from the Mozilla world
- technology excellence and industry wide leadership continues
- projects and products remain vital
2. Data: provide leadership in
- helping people exercise better ownership and control over their data
- making anonymous, aggregate “usage data” more of a public resource
3. Mobile
- have an effective product in the mobile market
- demonstrate that “mobile” is part of one, unified, open web
4. Continue Firefox mindshare and marketshare momentum
What are your thoughts? As you read these, what do you think as they relate to what you are doing inside l10n? How would you change these goals? What do you like?
Please comment on this post. I will respond to everyone’s comments, so this is not a one-way post and response. Let’s disuss it here. Any thoughts? Don’t hold back, let’s hear what you have to say.
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54 (was 52) locales participating in Firefox 3.1 Beta 2
54.
(It was 52…we got two late additions.)
That’s a big number.
Incredible thanks to all the localizers who participated. The teams are listed below where you’ll find a cut-and-paste of the patch that updates the shipped-locales bug filed by Axel. If you’re unfamiliar with the notation below, the “+” signs are locales we added from last time. The “-” are locales who didn’t make it. (See all of you in by RC1!
) You can tell the localizations by the locale codes: in some case it is two letters (ab) and in others it is four letters separated by a hyphen (ab-CD).diff --git a/browser/locales/shipped-locales b/browser/locales/shipped-locales --- a/browser/locales/shipped-locales +++ b/browser/locales/shipped-locales @@ -1,27 +1,39 @@ +af +ar be +bg +bn-IN ca cs +cy de +el +en-GB en-US -eo es-AR es-ES +et eu fi fr fy-NL ga-IE +gu-IN he hi-IN hu id +is it ja linux win32 ja-JP-mac osx +ka +kn ko lt +lv +mr nb-NO -nl nn-NO pa-IN pl @@ -31,7 +43,11 @@ ru si sk +sl +sq sv-SE +te +tr uk zh-CN zh-TW
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New Localized Download Pages
By clicking on this link, you’ll see the newly created download page for Firefox in Afrikaans.
This is an example of how the l10n-drivers team is trying hard to listen to our l10n community, and trying even harder to act upon the suggestions. We gathered feedback from a lot of locale leaders who thought we should experiment by creating individual download pages for locales who did not have a localized site featuring their version of Firefox. This idea was only validated when Chofmann traveled to Argentina and heard from some that 70% of Argentinians are using the es-ES (Spain) version of Firefox because search results pointed users to the Mozilla Europe es-ES page.
So, we joined up with marketing and web-dev to take on the experiment and made it a quarterly goal for the localization team. We started by researching which locales lacked a download page. Several of the European locales have such a page due to the great work in the past by our localizers and Mozilla Europe. But, for those who didn’t, we took on the effort to create ones. We should have as many as 40 new sites pointing to localizations by the end of this month. Special thanks to Pascalc, Laura Mesa, John Slater, Clouserw, and Oremj who did all this, and to the localizers who translated their pages. Let’s see how it impacts downloads.
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Gia Shervashidze, our Georgian Localizer
This past week, Staś sent out some reminder emails to our localizers that the code freeze for FF 3.1 Beta 2 was Sunday at 11:59 PM Mountain View time. Our Georgian localizer Gia Shervashidze wrote back,
“Hi Staś, Great, thanks, sorry – there was/is really mad times in Georgia. Well… i translate all missing strings for FF31 and start working with HG. So… i would like to start from “blank list” – to upload whole folders (browser, dom, netwerk, toolkit)? Is it possible at all? (file attached – f31.zip) same is true for Calendar, Thunderbird and Seamonkey (suite). Best, g.\” [sic]
Staś forwarded me the email and quickly we were reminded that there has been quite a struggle in Georgia over the past few months. Staś and I chatted on IRC about how amazing it was that Gia was going to make the deadline. And, it struck us both once again how much our localizers care about and do for Mozilla. Frankly, it stuns me, keeping me humble and focused.
I emailed Gia, writing, “Hey…if you don’t make the second beta, we understand. Please be well and let us know how we can help.” I asked Gia if I could blog about him, relaying that he is striving hard to localize Firefox 3.1 for the second beta, though his country has been battered recently by war. I mentioned that I thought it was a bit inspiring.
Gia quickly responded, saying that things weren’t so bad, and that he was more focused on getting FF 3.1 ready. He also asked me to mention some other things he is working on in Georgia right now, not dwelling on anything, but the work. Sure thing, Gia! Here’s a bit more of what he is doing:
“As the ICT person of the just founded “St. Andrew Georgian University” (http://www.sangu.ge – Georgian only) i’m going to prepare educational DVD with Georgian portable versions of Mozilla products and “derivatives” (Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, KompoZer, Songbird, possibly Seamonkey), Oxygen OpenOffice (UI – 100%, Help – partially), GCompris, TuxPaint, Stellarium, plenty of other soft, Georgian Unicode fonts, etc. (all of them are my contribution also) and [try to] freely distribute it in Georgia. i’ll give You to know as soon as it will be ready (not later than couple of weeks i hope – just waiting final versions of some soft) and yes, You can blog anything [about] without consent (just let me know if). There is a pleasure for me to participate in localization efforts for Mozilla. Great soft, great people.” [sic]
That’s amazing.
Truly a pleasure working with you, Gia. Thanks for your effort. Georgian is one of the 62 languages that Firefox ships in and we are proud to have you as part of the team!
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