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54 (was 52) locales participating in Firefox 3.1 Beta 2
54.
(It was 52…we got two late additions.)
That’s a big number.
Incredible thanks to all the localizers who participated. The teams are listed below where you’ll find a cut-and-paste of the patch that updates the shipped-locales bug filed by Axel. If you’re unfamiliar with the notation below, the “+” signs are locales we added from last time. The “-” are locales who didn’t make it. (See all of you in by RC1!
) You can tell the localizations by the locale codes: in some case it is two letters (ab) and in others it is four letters separated by a hyphen (ab-CD).diff --git a/browser/locales/shipped-locales b/browser/locales/shipped-locales --- a/browser/locales/shipped-locales +++ b/browser/locales/shipped-locales @@ -1,27 +1,39 @@ +af +ar be +bg +bn-IN ca cs +cy de +el +en-GB en-US -eo es-AR es-ES +et eu fi fr fy-NL ga-IE +gu-IN he hi-IN hu id +is it ja linux win32 ja-JP-mac osx +ka +kn ko lt +lv +mr nb-NO -nl nn-NO pa-IN pl @@ -31,7 +43,11 @@ ru si sk +sl +sq sv-SE +te +tr uk zh-CN zh-TW
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New Localized Download Pages
By clicking on this link, you’ll see the newly created download page for Firefox in Afrikaans.
This is an example of how the l10n-drivers team is trying hard to listen to our l10n community, and trying even harder to act upon the suggestions. We gathered feedback from a lot of locale leaders who thought we should experiment by creating individual download pages for locales who did not have a localized site featuring their version of Firefox. This idea was only validated when Chofmann traveled to Argentina and heard from some that 70% of Argentinians are using the es-ES (Spain) version of Firefox because search results pointed users to the Mozilla Europe es-ES page.
So, we joined up with marketing and web-dev to take on the experiment and made it a quarterly goal for the localization team. We started by researching which locales lacked a download page. Several of the European locales have such a page due to the great work in the past by our localizers and Mozilla Europe. But, for those who didn’t, we took on the effort to create ones. We should have as many as 40 new sites pointing to localizations by the end of this month. Special thanks to Pascalc, Laura Mesa, John Slater, Clouserw, and Oremj who did all this, and to the localizers who translated their pages. Let’s see how it impacts downloads.
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Gia Shervashidze, our Georgian Localizer
This past week, Staś sent out some reminder emails to our localizers that the code freeze for FF 3.1 Beta 2 was Sunday at 11:59 PM Mountain View time. Our Georgian localizer Gia Shervashidze wrote back,
“Hi Staś, Great, thanks, sorry – there was/is really mad times in Georgia. Well… i translate all missing strings for FF31 and start working with HG. So… i would like to start from “blank list” – to upload whole folders (browser, dom, netwerk, toolkit)? Is it possible at all? (file attached – f31.zip) same is true for Calendar, Thunderbird and Seamonkey (suite). Best, g.\” [sic]
Staś forwarded me the email and quickly we were reminded that there has been quite a struggle in Georgia over the past few months. Staś and I chatted on IRC about how amazing it was that Gia was going to make the deadline. And, it struck us both once again how much our localizers care about and do for Mozilla. Frankly, it stuns me, keeping me humble and focused.
I emailed Gia, writing, “Hey…if you don’t make the second beta, we understand. Please be well and let us know how we can help.” I asked Gia if I could blog about him, relaying that he is striving hard to localize Firefox 3.1 for the second beta, though his country has been battered recently by war. I mentioned that I thought it was a bit inspiring.
Gia quickly responded, saying that things weren’t so bad, and that he was more focused on getting FF 3.1 ready. He also asked me to mention some other things he is working on in Georgia right now, not dwelling on anything, but the work. Sure thing, Gia! Here’s a bit more of what he is doing:
“As the ICT person of the just founded “St. Andrew Georgian University” (http://www.sangu.ge – Georgian only) i’m going to prepare educational DVD with Georgian portable versions of Mozilla products and “derivatives” (Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, KompoZer, Songbird, possibly Seamonkey), Oxygen OpenOffice (UI – 100%, Help – partially), GCompris, TuxPaint, Stellarium, plenty of other soft, Georgian Unicode fonts, etc. (all of them are my contribution also) and [try to] freely distribute it in Georgia. i’ll give You to know as soon as it will be ready (not later than couple of weeks i hope – just waiting final versions of some soft) and yes, You can blog anything [about] without consent (just let me know if). There is a pleasure for me to participate in localization efforts for Mozilla. Great soft, great people.” [sic]
That’s amazing.
Truly a pleasure working with you, Gia. Thanks for your effort. Georgian is one of the 62 languages that Firefox ships in and we are proud to have you as part of the team!
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Vietnamese for FF 3.1?
Today, we filed the release tracker bug for the Vietnamese localization to participate in Firefox 3.1. If you look at that bug, you can see all the other bugs we have filed to get this localization ready for release (something I just blogged about).
The Vietnamese team has been incredibly motivated and responsive in working toward their goal of participating in FF 3.1. But, this is also a great example of teamwork and assistance from the l10n-drivers. Gandalf and Gen have been closely working to finalize a localization for Vietnamese. It’s not done yet, but we’re much closer.
The story behind it is very interesting. Sometimes, in our world of localization, it happens that two or more efforts are started on a translation and those teams surface at different times before the final localization is ready. In most cases, the teams start working together to finish the work. You can imagine that this is not the easiest undertaking. A lot of pride and time goes into the individual work. When translations surfaces from multiple teams, the l10n-drivers works with all the individuals to figure out what is the best next step. We strive to serve as the most objective intermediary and find an agreeable solution. In this case, we had two translations from two teams from different regions in Vietnam. Naturally, some differences in their work arose. The teams presented their work separately, both with good efforts that were nearly complete. At that point, we had to come together to decide what was best. We even enlisted the help of a native, 3rd-party Vietnamese speaker to help evaluate. But, the teams moved more quickly than we could and consolidated efforts to one. Along the way, Gandalf put in a lot of effort in communicating with them to help get to this solution. Also, with Silme, Gandalf provided technical assistance to help reconcile any differences. Many thanks to Jasper and Hung from the Vietnamese teams. Now, we’ll work on all the other aspecs necessary to localize, like the local web services. We are getting close and hoping to get them into the release cycle for Firefox 3.1.
In our Firefox l10n pipeline, with no particular order: Vietnamese, Kazakh, Mexican Spanish, Bengali (Bengladesh), and Bosnian. By “in the pipeline”, I mean we have had some recent activity with the localization teams and are working in some way to get them closer to shipping.
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6 new localizations added with the release of Firefox 3.0.4!
I’m sitting here with a lot of the Mozilla Europe Localization community and should be listening more closely to Pike, who is giving a presentation on testing localizations…but I had to share this news.
Check out this bug, which lands six new languages to Firefox with the release of FF 3.0.4.
We’ve added the new localization for users in the following locales:
- Bulgarian
- Esperanto
- Estonian
- Latvian
- Occitan
- Welsh
Congratulations to Ogi (bg), Eduardo (eo), Sander (et), Raivis (lv), Yannig (oc), and Dewi & David (cy) for all your hard work!! You’re now officially shipping Firefox…well, soon, when FF 3.0.4 is released.
Special thanks to Pike for driving the technical aspects of this release, Stas who managed the web services of this release, and Pascal on webparts. This the first release that Stas managed, so please send us some feedback. I think he did a great job. Finally, Gandalf stepped in sometime around 5 AM the day before the release to write a few patches and check in the code. It was a real team process…
Now the fun stuff. The numbers!
With these new localizations, 94.29%* of the World’s Internet population is covered by Firefox 2 and 3.
* Remember when I explained how Gerv created this model and we used it to measure impact? I still need to make this model more complete; caveat emptor, this is not the most accurate analysis…but I think it’s very close.
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