Thanks re NSO. I will be making an update soon, the above bug made me hold back, but seems its only Fedora users.

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.

@ Friedel: I am not sure if that is possible, but let me check with the l10n-drivers team.

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.

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).

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.