Friday night in SF – Saturday morning in Manila – Same time on the Web
==Log, Friday, March 19, 2010==
18:30: I arrive home after work and return online for a webinar hosted by the community folks in Manila, the capital city of The Philippines where it is presently 09:30 Saturday morning. (I just linked you to another MCS installation, which is a tool created by Gandalf.) Since Gen’s and my visit, a burgeoning Filipino community has been promoting Mozilla with community get-togethers and other activities, including this evening’s webinar on how to localize Firefox
18:45: Audio/Video test with Regnard Raquedan, the local community leader. I share with him my Tokbox video conference URL and we have audio with intermittent video. Not a big deal, with chat room functionality on Tokbox, I can speak and pass URLs to all who attend the webinar. Those with video can see me on a Friday night in my SF apartment.
19:00: Webinar starts with 7 people initially logging in. Introductions made. Active Filipino community includes Regnard, Joel, Kevin, Gian, Bob, Martin, Charmaine, and other guest users joining as we go.
19:15: I pass the following URLs to demonstrate localization:
- How to create a new localization – The centerpiece of our documentation written by Stas (and me) that we believe is the one-stop for all localizers to begin (or reference later when a question arises).
- Localizing with a web tool (in this case Narro) — A sub-article of the above piece. I gave Regnard a few options to look at before this webinar and he chose Narro.
- Narro — The webtool developed by Alexandru, our Romanian localizer, and hosted on our l10n-server.
19:30: I walk the webinar attendees through localization of the two main Mozilla l10n file types: DTD and property files. The demo we constructed has new localizers translating two highly visible strings so they can immediately see the impact of their work. As show in the document in point 2 above, we choose the “Manage Search Engines…” DTD file and the “Add %S” property file as examples of where to start. These strings are located in the search box UI of Firefox. You know where it is, check for yourself! 
19:45: The Filipino community offers translations for these two strings and decides which to use. Regnard is the initial Narro admin, so he reviews all the suggestions from the community participating in the webinar. After consensus, he approves the appropriate translations.
19:50: I discuss how we can create a language pack for testing through out the process so we don’t have to wait until all strings are translated to see the fruits of the labor. Narro allows teams to easily generate .XPIs for testing straight from the UI. Regnard can do this for the team and we decide to version our language packs (using the date as the versioning number) so people can keep the archive if they choose. (i.e. Tagalog_langpack_marso_20_2010, Tagalog_langpack_marso_21_2010, etc., or something like that…)
19:55: Final Q&A. Joel asks, “If we install a testable Tagalog .XPI, how can we switch back and forth to our original English-only UI?” I pass along the Quick Locale Switcher add-on. Everyone smiles.
20:00: We end the evening with pretty solid progress having been made. I think the evening was a success. I retire on my couch to watch Cal and Ohio State win their opening round games of the NCAA basketball tournament. Go Bears! Go Buckeyes! I fall asleep before the games are finished, much to the chagrin of my brother who excitedly texts me updates.
==Signing off==
Do you have a recording of that webinar? Sounds that it can be useful to other teams as well, as an introduction to the translation tools, as video is way better than plain text content.
Also their website seems to be in English, which make me wonder how come that we don’t have a central hub for content recommendations. For example, some articles may fit well on other communities, but each community have to decide for themselves which articles to publish and no one is recommending them what to publish. I use the planet as my news source, but most of the articles there are too technical to the average audience.
Hey Tomer:
Actually, the documentation I linked to was the best central piece. I really used that as *the* guide for the webinar. Here it is one more time:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Localizing_with_Narro
Content hub? Great idea! I should tell Gandalf to add that to the MCS list. Are you part of the MCS mailing list?
Hello Seth!
Here are my thoughts on yesterday’s webinar: http://www.mozillaphilippines.org/mozilla-firefox-localization-webinar-highlights/
