Four more locales added for Firefox 3.5 RC1
We’ve added four more locales for Firefox 3.5. These include Oriya, Romansh, Spanish (Chile), and Tamil (Sri Lanka).
Many thanks to Manoj (or), Sarves (ta-LK), Gion-Anrdi (rm), and Emilio (es-CL) for putting in some great effort in the last hours to complete their translations. Although a set of productization bugs still exists for these languages and Staś is working with these folks to resolve them, we’ll still ship the four new locales with Firefox 3.5 RC1. Malayalam will also join us for this release after translating 148 strings in the final push. ml has been with us in the past but slipped last time. Welcome back, Ani and Joyce.
If you’ve been counting, we *should* get up to 75 localizations for the final release of Firefox 3.5, shipping simultaneously across three platforms. Yesterday, I was skeptical we would not even come close to the number from beta 4. But, here is what happened…
Over the evening time in California, we lost a bit of sleep as we checked throughout the night on the status of teams and responded to emails. After midnight, we noticed that Alexandru (the maintainer of Narro) had seen a couple of localizations with translated strings that hadn’t been pushed back to us. He sent us one changeset and we waited a bit longer. At 4:30 AM, Staś got up and landed ta-LK in its repository since the team had not had the chance. Then, by the 5 AM code freeze, Alexandru committed the Vietnamese team’s final changes. Axel continued managing that opt-in thread I mentioned in my post yesterday. He and Staś also helped sort out some Mercurial landings that got a bit twisted around. By 11 AM in Mountain View, Axel was reporting on code freeze to the Firefox product team. We learned when builds would start (Sunday May 24), buying us a bit more time to finish our l10n, allowing a few more locales to make it in the process. We’re not finished yet, but we are very close…
This morning the l10n-drivers were chatting about how every time we go through a release, we are blown away by the responsiveness, dedication, and professionalism of this group of volunteers. Hats off to the localizers one more time.
