• Gia Shervashidze, our Georgian Localizer

    November 7th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with 3 comments »

    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!