Firefox 3.5 beta 4, 70 localizations
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:
- Spanish (Mexican)
- Kazakh (Kazakhstan)
- Bengali (Bengladesh)
- Assamese (India)
- Croatian (Croatia)
- 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.
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Congratulations!!! That is really amazing. The work of the community and the Corporation has been great on this release. Really looking forward to finalizing it and seeing the work used by friends, family and my work computer.
That’s pretty mind-blowing…nice work, all.
Just a gentle prod here. Sometimes from the outside it looks as if localizations wag the dog. See bug 318855, comments 97 and 98. 39 months to get update notifications for limited users in Windows, yet fixing it in version 3 is said to be prohibitive because of pain of localization. It even seems to be stalled, maybe, version 3.5.
Sweet stuff. Breaking the borders..
kudos to all those localizers who have put in a lot of hard work to achieve this feat…i am especially glad to see two new indian languages (assamesse and tamil)…great work!!
VanillaMozilla: This is a direct consequence of the l10n technology used in the Mozilla project, so I guess you can say it is by design. The localisation technology does not allow for new strings to be added without the translations being updated. As far as I know there is a requirement that language packs remain compatible over a release cycle (such as Firefox 3) and therefore that situation is as such.
Furthermore, because translations need to be updated for each English change just to build the localised version, lots of process needs to be in place with regards to string freezes and feature freezes to give localisers some time to get their work done, which is always limited to a very specific time in the release cycle of each alpha/beta/rc/release. If things are not updated, the whole localised version is dropped and not released.
So there are some reasons for the situation. Other projects also have things in place to handle string freezes. For reference, here is the GNOME one, which is not quite as strict, since their localisation technology allows for new strings being added without causing any problems for translations:
http://live.gnome.org/TranslationProject/HandlingStringFreezes
Vanilla Mozilla: I chose to respond to your comment on Asa’s blog and will re-link to that response here. For those interested in my comments, http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/04/holy_crap_thats.html
F Wolff: Thank you for the detailed response and opinion.
Our aim at Mozilla is to ship excellent software to all of our end-users. So, you are correct that we do want all strings of our user interface to be translated. I believe many of our passionate localizers who are the stewards for their end-user community agree with this requirement because they want their users to have the best browser possible for their locale. But, a follow on question for you, if we were to ship a milestone that did not have all strings translated, how would we perform proper end-user testing of translations? As a highly-leveraged free software project, we rely so greatly on feedback from our contributors, including end-users who may send us a note that says something like, “hey…this just isn’t a correct translation.”
Luckily, our localizer community is a group of passionate, dedicated, and serious individuals who take pride in shipping excellent software. It’s not the easiest process, but it is a good browser for end-users.
In the future, we may see nightly builds (NB: not shipped milestones) that have merged en-US and ab-CD strings, so localizers can see their work in progress. But, rarely will we ship software that does not have a full translation.
Does that seem to make sense?
WoW Great!
Mozilla Firefox is the super browser
Personally
)
I have a question?!
What about localizing Firefox 3.5 to Uzbek version…
I can Personally help(4 free of coz), i’m web developer by the way
Sorry, gentlemen, I forgot to check this blog for replies. But no, that does not make sense.
Of course you do not want to ship a change with strings that are not translated in some localizations, but from your descriptions it appears that the process may be needlessly complex and inflexible. F. Wolff writes, “As far as I know there is a requirement that language packs remain compatible over a release cycle (such as Firefox 3) and therefore that situation is as such.” If you’re really freezing strings for the duration of a major version, that means that needed changes could get postponed for a year or more at a time. I hope I don’t have to persuade anyone that regardless of whatever difficulties changes might entail, a long delay or cancellation is an undesirable outcome.
And frankly, I am not persuaded that there is a significant inherent difficulty in translating a few strings. Typically we’re talking about translating a few words or a sentence or two, and this should not pose a significant difficulty for native speakers, even with due diligence and review. I assume we’re not talking about a major overhaul of the UI, or a major project with many strings, which is another problem that would require beta review.
Why is it not possible to write the strings, and then simply wait until the strings have been translated and approved on a timely basis? At that point the bug can be merged with the code base. If you’re worried about moving targets, you could wait until a patch is reviewed, if you must, and then translate. But I don’t see why translations for isolated bugs could’t be done on a timely basis.
You shouldn’t have synchronization problems, as far as I can tell. Each string should have an identifier, and it’s either used or it isn’t. Everyone tells me the process is complicated or difficult, but I have to wonder if there isn’t an unnecessary problem somewhere in the system.
Hi, just wondering that how come its not available in Urdu, its not that hard as I can see Firefox is available in Arabic and Farsi. These languages are very similar to each other and I am sure it would help a lot of newbies in Pakistan to surf internet, not only that but they will also leave IE for FF, because I’ve seen that mostly people just use IE as they don’t know any other alternatives, but bringing in Urdu would definitely encourage them to transfer to FF.
please make an Urdu version also
You Should Consider MALAYALAM(India) language too for your next version.
Finally, Firefox on Croatian… =)
I would be great if we could get an Afghan (Pashto) version as well. People inside Afghanistan are not that good and comfortable with English.
Hi,
Can I help you?
Where is localizer community for Malay language.
I want to support them to provide language for Malaysian.
Hi LaNN:
We have a group of localizers who are starting to really work on their translations. Please send me an email that I can forward their way. My email is sethb at mozilla dot com.
Jaiben,
Malayalam is already in, wait for the RC or if impatient take one nightly builds. If you would like to help out, see http://wiki.smc.org.in/
- Praveen
Swathanthra Malayalam Computing
Hi
Pls make an Myanmar version too for your next.
Nice to see firefox in croatian