Mayan Inspiration

October 20th, 2009 by seth bindernagel

When I was at the Mozilla Camp in Chile, I met Julián Ceballos, the team leader from Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula who is working on localizing Firefox in Mayan. Yesterday, he wrote me, saying,

“In Mozcamp i said, mozilla is no helping just to translate firefox to mayan, mozilla is helping to rescue and make strong the mayan language. Well, i’ll send it and we’ll be in contact.” [sic]

Aw, shucks. That just makes me happy.

Maybe I have delusions of grandeur as I sit here and sip my Kool-Aid, but I think there is something critical to language preservation happening in the Mozilla localization project for cultural anthropologist and linguists to study. I’ve discussed this topic with other Mozillans who are interested like Tiffney Mortensen, Chofmann, Staś, John Lilly, Søren Skrøder (Mozilla Denmark), and Kadir Topal (Mozilla Germany). Every time we ship a new version, even for some of the most niche locales, Mozilla helps just a little bit to preserve the culture of language and communication. Imagine how unique an experience it becomes for a total newcomer to browse the web with an application whose user interface is both translated and customized for local use. That can be very powerful and is why we want Mozilla locale count to continue to grow.

To see a little more about what our Mayan friends are doing, check out these links:

Do you know of a new localization effort? I will pay chocolate dipped cake donuts for every referral that becomes a localization.