Help me test two Kiswahili versions of Firefox
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:
- Kilinux: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collection/kiswahili.kilinux
- tzLUG: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collection/kiswahili.tzlug
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.
Steps to use Litmus to test these language packs.
1. First create an account in Litmus and login.
2. Click on Firefox 3.5 Localizer Test Run, which will be the third option in the list.
3. After you click on the test run link, please leave en-US selected as the language for the test run. This is very important. *Please note that you cannot use the Litmus interface provided to you to record the results of your Kiswahili testing since it is not an official localization yet.* You will only see the official localizations in Litmus, with en-US as the default staring point, but no “sw-TZ”.
4. Leave en-US, and then select your platform and OS, and hit “Submit Configuration”.
5. On the next “Select a Testgroup and Subgroup to Test” screen, please leave the “3.5 l10n testgroup” and “3.5 l10n testrun” options selected. Hit “Submit”.
6. Twenty-three tests will appear. Please read the tests, perform them, and then record your results in English. Again, you will not use the actual Litmus interface to record any results! Hope that is clear. Keep detailed notes about each test.
7. When you are finished with each of the 23 tests, please send your notes about the results to me.
I wanted to do some technical comparison of the two packs – jut for fun.
I noticed that with Firefox 3.5.1 it’s says “An older version may work” i.e. that it’s not compatible. This occurs even though the “Works with” field sets an upper version number of 3.5.* (The same issue is present on our Northern Sotho language pack addon).
Hi Seth. Is it possible to publish the files in the l10n structure somewhere? It will make it easier to put the files into a translation format that will allow review in translations tools.
About your requirements: “You must be able to read Swahili and English fluently and you must use Firefox.“. I think an ideal reviewer should be familiar with Swahili software. But that would probably exclude the whole world population. In my opinion nobody is able to properly evaluate translations in a new language while trends have not yet been set, and the solution to common problems are not yet well known. Somebody might not like some stylistic choice taken by one team, but that might not necessarily indicate bad quality one way or the other. And if the little bit that is available currently has issues, comparing with existing software might not even be a good idea necessarily. Since this is a new language in software localisation, I guess both teams will inevitably still improve if they continue to work in this field. I know that my team continues to find better solutions to certain translation problems, and quality continues to improve as expertise accumulates.
I would be surprised if there are humongous differences between the two Firefox translations – I assume they both started their work from the previous work that was done on the Mozilla suite (if I remember correctly).
I can only offer a slight review based on our QA tools and some basic knowledge of the Bantu language family. If the l10n files (in the hg structure) are available, I can try to look at it this week or next, perhaps. A tarball on the Mozilla l10n server would be fine.
@ Dwayne: For each of them? Or just one of the two collections?
@ Friedel: I am not sure if that is possible, but let me check with the l10n-drivers team.
@ Seth: both of them
– you can see the same problem for Northern Sotho here https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6182
Dwayne: Very weird, but they all work for me, including the Northern Sotho addon. I am running “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1.1) Gecko/20090715 Firefox/3.5.1″.
Nice work on the Northern Sotho translation. Looks pretty cool! I was even able to read the word “Khansela” had I wanted to cancel my cmd-Q (Quit) of Firefox when I needed to restart to return to my en-US settings.
Seth: Your Browser ID got me on the right track. This is mine ‘Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.1) Gecko/20090717 Fedora/3.5.1-1.fc11 Firefox/3.0.5, Ant.com Toolbar 1.2′ seems it calles itself Fedora/3.5.1 and Firefox 3.0.5 no wonder!
Thanks re NSO. I will be making an update soon, the above bug made me hold back, but seems its only Fedora users.