Nice finds
Now 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.
We need a world map with mark on every single country which have localized Firefox. I guess must of the missing languages are in Africa.
Just to compare – How many language IE8 has?
Tomer: country != language. That’s why flags are bad icons for languages. I believe there are approximately 4500 catalogued spoken languages in the world (depending on how you define “language”) so the missing ones are pretty much everywhere
@Tomer: yes we are missing some form Africa. Firefox is already in Afrikaans, which is an African language. Seth has Swahili on his near term-term pipeline. We can also safely add Northern Sotho on the longer-term pipeline. Northern Sotho work is progressing well with the translation now at 52% of words complete.