70 locales
It’s been a busy week for the l10n team. Has anyone else been following the l10n release tracking bugs for Firefox 3.5? Take a look at this dependency tree from Bugzilla showing 79 open bugs for potential locales. That’s a rough list of the upcoming locales for Firefox 3.5. Please keep in mind that this does not mean that we will add all these langauges for the upcoming release. But, I will say that we will add *some* number of those listed. In fact, just this past week, Axel added the following localizations (language, primary region, locale code) to the l10n dashboard:
- Bengali, Bangladesh, bn-BD
- Oriya, India, or
- Spanish, Mexico, es-MX
- Croatian, Croatia, hr
If the locale is building on the dashboard, it means Mozilla’s build and release team is now officially generating localized versions of that language. It doesn’t mean they are usable versions, but localizers work on translations until their builds are green. If you looked at that l10n dashboard link from above and click on ff31x in the “Tree” section , then you’ll see that we are now building 70 versions of Firefox!
It’s likely that we will also a new version of English for South Africa, Kazakh, a version of Tamil for Sri Lanka, and Assamese at some point during Firefox 3.5. Finally, we are doing active outreach and support to Swahili, Malay, and Azerbaijani. This happens primarily because of the drive and passion of individuals who are eager to translate into their native language (they’re listed above in that bug tree). But, it’s also due to some specific community folks:
- Axel Hecht
- Pascal Chevrel
- Staś Małolepszy
- Zbigniew Braniecki
- Gervase Markham
- The Release Engineering team
Now, to reel in the celebration a bit, it’s easy to get excited by these numbers, but we put in serious effort to make sure we can scale…and we’re starting to feel the pressure. Managing 70 locales across three platforms is not an easy task. Look for more blog posts from me on what we are doing to sustain this pace.
I forgot to mention Romansh to the list above. They are also closing in on a localization.
More on Romansh: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romansh
Good day. I am from Azerbaijan. I am a web designer. I know the Azerbaijani grammar is very well…I can help translate Firefox to Azerbaijani.