Vietnamese for FF 3.1?

Today, we filed the release tracker bug for the Vietnamese localization to participate in Firefox 3.1.  If you look at that bug, you can see all the other bugs we have filed to get this localization ready for release (something I just blogged about).

The Vietnamese team has been incredibly motivated and responsive in working toward their goal of participating in FF 3.1.  But, this is also a great example of teamwork and assistance from the l10n-drivers.  Gandalf and Gen have been closely working to finalize a localization for Vietnamese.  It’s not done yet, but we’re much closer.

The story behind it is very interesting.  Sometimes, in our world of localization, it happens that two or more efforts are started on a translation and those teams surface at different times before the final localization is ready.  In most cases, the teams start working together to finish the work.  You can imagine that this is not the easiest undertaking.  A lot of pride and time goes into the individual work.  When translations surfaces from multiple teams, the l10n-drivers works with all the individuals to figure out what is the best next step.  We strive to serve as the most objective intermediary and find an agreeable solution.  In this case, we had two translations from two teams from different regions in Vietnam.  Naturally, some differences in their work arose.  The teams presented their work separately, both with good efforts that were nearly complete.  At that point, we had to come together to decide what was best.  We even enlisted the help of a native, 3rd-party Vietnamese speaker to help evaluate.  But, the teams moved more quickly than we could and consolidated efforts to one.  Along the way, Gandalf put in a lot of effort in communicating with them to help get to this solution.  Also, with Silme, Gandalf provided technical assistance to help reconcile any differences.  Many thanks to Jasper and Hung from the Vietnamese teams.  Now, we’ll work on all the other aspecs necessary to localize, like the local web services.  We are getting close and hoping to get them into the release cycle for Firefox 3.1.

In our Firefox l10n pipeline, with no particular order:  Vietnamese, Kazakh, Mexican Spanish, Bengali (Bengladesh), and Bosnian.  By “in the pipeline”, I mean we have had some recent activity with the localization teams and are working in some way to get them closer to shipping.