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.

In December, 2008, the Community Giving Program provided five Mac Minis to the NSS community that are being used as 1) an internal build machine, 2) an internal nightly automated QA machine, 3) an NSS stable branch tinderbox, 4) an NSS trunk tinderbox, and 5) a developer test/QA machine.

Today, on behalf of the NSS community, Glen Beasley updated me with a quick report:

“We have been running full internal build/QA on two of the Mac Mini’s. These reports can be sent to external NSS users if they request to be on the list. We also have tinderboxes for 32 bit and 64 bit Mac OS X builds.”

http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/NSS/

“In the past months the Mac OS tinderbox’s have revealed a few developer build breakages and QA issues that likely would have gone unnoticed for several days/weeks had we not had the tinderbox/build machines in place.”

The first four machines benefit Mac OS X support because, in the past, we have gone weeks before finding out that a Mac OS build had been broken by a checkin.   With more solid Tier 1 build/QA support for Mac OS X, the community has been able to find breakages sooner.  Finally, the last Mini is accessible by NSS developers to address build/regression failures and develop Mac OS X specific functionality.

It should also be mentioned that anyone interested in contributing to the NSPR/NSS/JSS team should comment here and I will be sure to make the introductions to Glen and the team.

As always, if you know of any potential recipients for Community Giving program that would empower someone or a community with Mozilla, please let me know.  Though I focus mostly on Localization, this program is still thriving and we are always seeking leveraged opportunities to support recipients.

Luckily, this extreme monoculture does not exist in most other countries, but it doesn’t mean that users are always free to choose whatever browser they want when doing things like banking transactions.  Sites are still being created that require an ActiveX control to do encrypted communication.

For example, in Taiwan many people use Web ATM to do online banking.  The Taiwan Review wrote an interesting article in 2005 called, “A Web of Opportunity“.  In that article, they discuss the benefits of Web ATM:

“Some forward-looking local banks have introduced a new solution, Web ATM, a Web page that allows payers to transfer funds directly using a chip-stored identity card and their own card reader. Chip cards are much safer than the magnetic strip variety and as a consequence of this heightened security, Taiwan’s banks are now required to replace magnetic strip ATM cards with them.”

The problem is that all banks with Web ATM service required an ActiveX control, so users had to no choice but to use Internet Explorer.

Until now.

We recently got word that E.SUN Bank‘s Web ATM became the first to support Firefox (and other browsers with the same plug-in framework) on Windows.  What an accomplishment and a step forward for banking on the Web in Taiwan!

I began to wonder about E.SUN’s motivation for this change.

• Did E.SUN Bank do this because of changes in browser market share?
• Did their users demand Firefox support?
• Was there a business opportunity for them to be the first to market?
• Are they a progressive organization promoting open standards for the Web?

Regardless of the strategic motivation behind this decision, online banking just changed in Taiwan and users benefit by now having more choice on the Web.

Soon after this decision, our Taiwanese localization team contacted us to ask how we can feature and promote this new service.  In this bug, you’ll see the discussion and decision to feature E.SUN Bank on pages that we serve to Taiwanese Firefox users on Windows.  Staś  really sums it up best with his opening remark:

“E.SUN Bank from Taiwan has done a big effort to make their website available for Firefox users. This is an important step for Firefox adoption in the region and consequently, we would like to feature a link to their website for a certain period of time on the zh-TW web parts (whatsnew, firstrun and central pages)….The important thing is to show the link only to Windows users. We would love to see this live for the 3.0.8 release.”

Web evangelism efforts like these are taking place in Mozilla locales across the globe.  Without having much to do with it, I am still proud of the accomplishment and that we can shine a spotlight on E.SUN Bank for crossing that frontier.  A big congratulations is due to E.SUN Bank, the MozTW team (Bob Chao, Tim Dream, and flybird), and Gen.  Thank you, guys.

1. The addons.mozilla.org (AMO) editor community will use this Xserve to test extensions on platforms where some of them lack access.  They filed this bug, which provides more background on the need.
2. The SeaMonkey team filed a request with this bug to get more virtual machines for testing.  It took us some time to process as we decided what was best and most leveraged.
3. Finally, the server will be used as a place for the IT community (with AMO and SeaMonkey) to test virtualization of OSX.

Just today, I was at a conference and was asked what we mean by providing leveraged resources to our community.  This is a good example.  With the Xserve, we are serving many different purposes:  hundreds of thousands SeaMonkey users will benefit;  all add-on editors can now test on three platforms, which may result in quicker processing of the sandbox where new add-ons go before being listed on AMO; and, the IT community will use the Xserve to test virtualization.

Finally, if anyone is asking, I am still managing community requests, but at a slower pace for two reasons:  community requests have slowed down a bit since we launched the program a couple years back, and localization occupies most of my time so I don’t do as aggressive outreach as I did in the past.  But, we are receiving requests and I do get to them.  If you’ve contacted me about a request, we will respond.

1. Bengali, Bangladesh, bn-BD
2. Oriya, India, or
3. Spanish, Mexico, es-MX
4. Croatian, Croatia, hr

If the locale is building on the dashboard, it means Mozilla’s build and release team is now officially generating localized versions of that language.  It doesn’t mean they are usable versions, but localizers work on translations until their builds are green.  If you looked at that l10n dashboard link from above and click on ff31x in the “Tree” section , then you’ll see that we are now building 70 versions of Firefox!

It’s likely that we will also a new version of English for South Africa, Kazakh, a version of Tamil for Sri Lanka, and Assamese at some point during Firefox 3.5.  Finally, we are doing active outreach and support to Swahili, Malay, and Azerbaijani.  This happens primarily because of the drive and passion of individuals who are eager to translate into their native language (they’re listed above in that bug tree).  But, it’s also due to some specific community folks:

• Axel Hecht
• Pascal Chevrel
• Staś Małolepszy
• Zbigniew Braniecki
• Gervase Markham
• The Release Engineering team

Now, to reel in the celebration a bit, it’s easy to get excited by these numbers, but we put in serious effort to make sure we can scale…and we’re starting to feel the pressure.  Managing 70 locales across three platforms is not an easy task.  Look for more blog posts from me on what we are doing to sustain this pace.

I hope anyone interest will contribute or change their theme. We can help with that if you’d like.

Lastly, I posted this entry about GNUnify09 in India. But, I am afraid that it didn’t hit planet since I recently converted all the categories on my blog to tags. We upgraded our blogging software to WordPress 2.7 and that was one of the new features I used.

1. The localizers may not face the same complexity of plural forms that we see in other languages in other regions.  But, they are craving *more* transparency and clarity for our process.  It’s my belief that we have made it very clear just what needs to be done to get a localization official.  So, it might require me to do a summary email or reblog post to highlight a few places to look when wondering what checklist exists for localizing.
2. Again and again, I heard people asking me what Mozilla is going to do to get content localized on the Web.  A common remark I heard was that it’s very nice to have the browser chrome and UI translated into so many languages, but what are we going to do for translation of content on the web.  Frankly, I am not sure what stance Mozilla should take here.  I can see the obvious point that a translated browser is a good step, but what good is it if all the content on the Web is in English.  But, I also know that we are developing client application software in addition to fighting for standards on the Web.  My first thought is to keep a close watch to see where we can enter to help promote a healthier Web that includes content for everyone. One response that I provided to a lot of people is that we do our best to work with localizers to find the best local content that exists on the web that we then feature on our “Getting Started” page.
3. Fonts are an issue in India and some of the creators of most highly used fonts have only designed them to work on IE.  Arun took particular passion in this field and we plan to follow up with a few folks to start the evangelism on making fonts work on the Web, regardless of a users browser.
4. Web developers we met found Arun’s presentations and demos terrific and we seemed to gather a lot of questions about SVG, OGG and theora.
5. HTML5 is a hot topic with a lot of curiosity.  A lot of excellent questions arose about the specs of HTML5.  Arun did a really nice job illustrating canvas and video tags with relevant examples demoed in Firefox 3.1.

It’s my opinion that we had a really successful trip through India.  Our localizers are a close team who are dedicated to helping Mozilla.  Our campus reps program is taking off and everywhere we went we met at least two or three new reps.  Web developers we met had a sincere interest in the open Web and Arun made lots of friends with that topic.  Without question, there is a lot of interest in the Mozilla here and I think we’ll benefit by offering continued support and helping those inspired Indians to become the leaders of the large, diverse, and complex community.

I am now leaving India and “stopping through” Beijing to see Li Gong and meet the localizers and community there for the first time.

February 6 – 9:  FOSDEM in Brussels with many European localizers and open source developers
February 10 – 11:  Delhi, India for MozDelhi Camp
February 12 – 13:  Kanpur, India for FOSSkriti at ITT Kanpur
February 14 – 15:  Pune, India for GNUify
February 18 – 21:  Beijing, China with a big community event on Saturday, February 21 at the Mozilla office

On my journey through the subcontinent, I will be joined by fellow Mozillan, Arun Ranganathan.  When I separate from Arun, I’ll go to our China office in Beijing to visit Li Gong and the team and to present to the community there.

During our presentations, we will demo several tools for developers and localizers to use to expand their impact, build new community, and drive more mainstream adoption of Mozilla ideas.  It will be a breakneck pace and we are staying with friends along the way in hope to make this trip as leveraged as possible.  Many thanks to Shashank (FOSSkriti) and Harshad (GNUify) for providing me and Arun both transportation and accommodation at their respective conference locations.

My presentation has four sections, designed for easy plug-and-play, depending on the audience.  Here is what I plan to discuss on the quest.

1. Mozilla and Community overview, using localization efforts to illustrate the breadth of Mozilla’s community contribution.  I’ll present some interesting Firefox 3.1 localization participation statistics, including new languages since FF 3.0.
2. New Community tools, demoing Mozilla Community Sites project
3. Improving localization tools, recapping Verbatim, demoing Silme, and discussing new ideas
4. Where do we go next?  L20n demos

I’ll post the slides when they are ready.  They are still in pieces and demos are still being finalized.

Highlights include the following:

• Integrating with Mozilla’s code repository system, Mercurial
• Launching their offline editor Virtaal, which will allow localizers to work on translations when they are unable to access the Web
• Merging Verbatim work by clouserw and dschafer into their trunk.  (Wil wrote a very thoughtful piece about the decisions Wil and Mozilla made before choosing to hack on Pootle and how it has gone since then.)
• Migrating to Django, a new web platform for Pootle that should make developer contributions in the future a bit easier

We hope to have two projects integrated into Verbatim by the end of this quarter so localizers can use the tool to translate the UI for both AMO (addons.mozilla.org) and SUMO (support.mozilla.com).  This will happen due to the great work by Wil Clouser and the guys at Translate Toolkit.

…even more ambitious is the undertaking of Mozilla’s chief lizard wrangler.   You may have seen Mitchell’s post about the 2010 goal setting process.  Mozilla is really trying to push the envelope when it comes to inclusiveness and distributed authority.  And, we want everyone in the l10n community to have a chance to provide his or her input on the vision of Mozilla for 2010.  When you think of the localization community in the future, what do you envision?

Mitchell lists the following Mozilla-wide goals:

1. Deepen Mozilla’s role as a centerpiece of the Internet

• communities continue to expand and provide means for individual development
• thought leadership expands to include things such as the open web, hybrid social enterprises, organizational sustainability, shared decision-making, individual control, and portability in Internet life
• innovations emerge from the Mozilla world
• technology excellence and industry wide leadership continues
• projects and products remain vital

2. Data:  provide leadership in

• helping people exercise better ownership and control over their data
• making anonymous, aggregate “usage data” more of a public resource

3. Mobile

• have an effective product in the mobile market
• demonstrate that “mobile” is part of one, unified, open web

4. Continue Firefox mindshare and marketshare momentum

What are your thoughts?  As you read these, what do you think as they relate to what you are doing inside l10n?  How would you change these goals?  What do you like?

Please comment on this post.  I will respond to everyone’s comments, so this is not a one-way post and response.  Let’s disuss it here.  Any thoughts?  Don’t hold back, let’s hear what you have to say.