• Nice finds

    April 21st, 2009 by seth bindernagel with 3 comments »

    aboutNow and again, we’ll come across volunteers who speak languages where we do not have a localization, but who look promising to join us for future Firefox releases.  We receive references from everywhere: Gerv forwards me names from the comments on his blog; Gen does outreach at conferences he attends and then sends us information; or we find newcomers through our l10n newsgroup. 

    Soon after, one of us then makes contact to see if the people are ready or willing to start our localization process.  If the answer is yes, we give them the basic set of documents to get a localization going and we then start the work together, oftentimes with Mozilla’s l10n community helping to answer questions along the way.

    Swahili, Romansh, and Oriya are a few in our near-term pipeline.  Which languages are in our longer-term list?  Maybe you saw Gen’s post about a Gecko-based browser in Khmer.  And, here’s a new one: a screen shot from new volunteers who are working on localizing Firefox into Azerbaijani. If you know of some other possibilities, please feel free to share them here.

  • Useful communication tool for Mozilla web localization

    April 20th, 2009 by seth bindernagel with 6 comments »

    Pascal Chevrel introduced me to an experiment he calls “main.lang string checker” that he created over the weekend.  With this tool, localizers and the l10n-drivers team at Mozilla can check the status of the main.lang file, which is a kind of “po” file we use on our static html sites.  Pascal has been meaning to create this tool for some time.  It’s not overly complex, but it will help when either the Mozilla QA team, a localizer, or Pascal (or Stas) asks about specific files not being translated.

    For an example, let’s take a look at French locale’s page.  Here you’ll see a section titled “Missing strings.” and another named “Strings identical to English.”  At the bottom is a link to the French translations of the strings in the fr main.lang in SVN.  At this page, a localizer has a basic snapshot of the state of their team’s web l10n.

    I see some quick and direct benefits:

    1. Localizers can now see very specifically what l10n strings need examination
    2. New localizaiton teams who have finished localizing the Firefox product can see the the web localization tasks ahead
    3. Mozilla improves its communication regarding what specifically needs to be accomplished for a version to become official

    This is just another starting point.  We’ll have to work on unifying all of the recent improvements and forthcoming changes we’ll be seeing over the next couple weeks and months.  But, please find your locale of interest to see what needs to be investigated and possibly translated.

    Thanks, Pascal.

  • Firefox 3.5 beta 4, 70 localizations

    April 15th, 2009 by seth bindernagel with 19 comments »

    Holy crap, that’s a lot!

    For those who might not have been on today’s Firefox call at 11 AM (UTC -7), Axel announced that we have 69 locales participating in beta 4. (After the meeting, Macedonia went green!!) The number is huge, but it was the effort and patience from our localizers that was most impressive.  Here’s why they made it a success:

    • In the initial communication about Firefox 3.5 beta 4, we mentioned that the new beta would only be about 20 strings.  It turned out to be 145 to translate!  That’s not trivial.  In terms of time required to do this, it goes from probably 1 hour to 1 day of work, depending on localizer familiarity with the process.  No one complained about the increase in strings…
    • Along the way, the code freeze slipped to April 15, after we pushed everyone to be ready by April 6.  Again, no complaints from our localizers…
    • Bugs regarding siteSearch and Mibbit caused some “breakage” to all of our localizations.  Stas asked everyone over a few posts to the l10n newsgroup for their patience and understanding until proper policies were established on how to resolve bugs.   And, no complaints from the localizers, once again…

    In the end 70 of our 71 localizations made it into the beta process, making this our most successful localized beta ever.

    Special congratulations to six new locales who will participate:

    1. Spanish (Mexican)
    2. Kazakh (Kazakhstan)
    3. Bengali (Bengladesh)
    4. Assamese (India)
    5. Croatian (Croatia)
    6. Tamil (India)

    This one is nearly passed off to build and then we’ll be moving on to the Firefox 3.5 release candidates and final release.  Can we get over 70?  I’d bet on it.