• Help me test two Kiswahili versions of Firefox

    July 23rd, 2009 by seth bindernagel with 7 comments »

    Surely, you saw me fire off a response two weeks ago about playing politics with our Kiswahili localization communities.  Let’s move on from that flame war by summarizing our situation and presenting a path to a solution.

    Presently, we have two communities, the tzLUG and the Kilinux teams, who have translated the Firefox application into Kiswahili (sw-TZ).  Unfortunately, we have had tough luck in getting an unbiased, thorough evaluation of each body of work to help us decide which one to use.  As it turned out, it was hard to find a number of individuals familiar enough with technical writing and Kiswahili who had time on their hands to volunteer for Mozilla.  Furthermore, we didn’t have an easy package to evaluate, except for the “diff” of the code differences between the two.  Yeah, that sounds ugly and it was.  Still is.

    To solve what has become a long-standing debate, we asked each team leader to create a Mozilla language pack of their work as an add-on that we would then host on and promote though our addons.mozilla.org website.  Both teams agreed and uploaded their versions.  Since then, I created two separate “collections” that bundle each language pack with Ben Smedberg’s Locale Switcher addon.  Our hope is that end-users ready to test will install both versions and use the addons.mozilla.org site to provide feedback to each developer team.

    If you are interested in testing each version, please install the following two collections:

    Once you have installed these, you can switch between the two versions and your English interface by going to the menu item Tools –> Languages…

    Now for testing…

    Requirements: You must be able to read Swahili and English fluently and you must use Firefox.

    If you choose to test these localization language packs, you’ll need to follow something similar to the “Firefox 3.5 Localizer Test Run” that has been created in Litmus, Mozilla’s testing application.  If you use Litmus, please follow the steps I have posted in the first comment on this blog post.

    You can also just use each language pack and keep notes of errors you spot.  Whether you choose to use Litmus or not, please record any translation errors that you find in the user interface of each version.  Please be very descriptive and thorough with any notes you keep, and write the notes in English.  Take a look at the word choices, terminology, spelling, grammar, etc. and keep a record of errors you see.  When you are finished, you can submit your evaluation to me.  Just ping me on this blog.

    As always, please ask some questions if you have them.  Nothing is off limits.