Helpful Mozilla localization documentation
Yesterday, I posted in the moz.dev.l10n newsgroup (our main mailing list for communication among localizers) a summary of information for localizers who want to learn about our process, start a new localization, or keep track of all that needs to be done to become an official localization.
I’ve blogged about this in the past, but am posting a reminder because it’s valuable information. Also, I heard from a few localizers when I was traveling that the process is still unclear and we need a good checklist of information for people to review as they become involved.
Here is a checklist (probably more detailed than a simplified checklist because our process has multiple parts) we have so far:
- Mozilla l10n main wiki page that serves as a starting point
- How to get an official localization for Firefox
- Localizing Mozilla web pages and web parts (needed for official status)
- Web services (sometimes referred to as “productization”) (needed for official status)
As you start and continue through the process, these four links will be particularly helpful. If you are familiar with our process and would like to link to more documentation, please list it here.
I think there is one thing that you may want to check:
Don’t how it is in other countries, but in Vietnam, when I google for “localize firefox” or “firefox localization” etc., the first result is usually “http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/l10n/index.html” which has very old content and even doesn’t link to the L10N Home Page. And the L10N Localization Process page is often below the 5th position.
Ugh. We gladly got the projects/l10n stuff killed on the web, but that’s still lingering around.
Not sure if there’s an existing bug on that, but we should probably just cvs remove that page.
Axel: Never do CVS remove, but redirection can be very helpful.
seth: I think you are missing a Mercurial cookbook with receipts for localizers.
I’d add: https://wiki.mozilla.org/L10n:Firefox_web_services_process and http://informationisart.com/stas/on/process where I’ll try to provide more details in the future (shameless plug).
Tomer: I think we do have a good Mercurial cookbook. Did you see this on the main page?
https://developer.mozilla.org/En/L10n_on_Mercurial
Tell me if this was not helpful. If not, we will add some recipes.
Tomer, we did CVS remove on purpose. Those pages are old, and they’re cruft, and whoever linked to them before deserves a 404. Which is probably the best way to tell search engines to remove it from their indices, too.
Hùng, good catch. I can see this in Poland too. We should fix this by redirecting to wikimo/L10n. I filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481877 for that. Thanks!