• Travel

    February 6th, 2009 by seth bindernagel with 2 comments »

    Yesterday, I embarked on a long journey where I will visit much of the Mozilla community.  By the time I am done, I will interact with about 30 of our localization teams at various conferences where I will be a participant.  Here’s an itinerary for anyone who might be interested in meeting up:

    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.

  • 54 (was 52) locales participating in Firefox 3.1 Beta 2

    November 11th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with 1 comment »

    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

  • Gia Shervashidze, our Georgian Localizer

    November 7th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with 3 comments »

    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!

  • Vietnamese for FF 3.1?

    November 6th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with 1 comment »

    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.

  • Localization schedule for Firefox 3.1 Beta 2

    October 15th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with 4 comments »

    I posted this message to the dev-l10n mailing list, but if you did not see it there or do not subscribe to that list, here is a secondary posting.

    The string freeze for the Firefox 3.1 beta 2 is going to be Thursday, October 30 at 11:59 PM (Mountain View, CA time), which is just over two weeks from now.  Code freeze will be Tuesday, November 4 (Mountain View, CA time) at 11:59 PM.

    https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3.1/StatusMeetings/2008-10-15#Firefox_3.1

    If you did not make FF 3.1 beta 1, we would love for you to participate in the next beta release.  The l10n-drivers team has a goal of a fully-localized beta, so please let us know what we can do to help you as you get in beta 2.  We are here to help you so please just ask.

    Here are some important resources for you to check:

    *  Pike’s l10n dashboard:  http://l10n.mozilla.org/dashboard/
    *  L10n Tinderbox:  http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/showbuilds.cgi?tree=Mozilla-l10n
    *  Mercurial tips and tools:  http://developer.mozilla.org/En/L10n_on_Mercurial

    If you run into problems, please ask for help in the dev-l10n group, on #l10n, or on #hg.  You can always comment on this blog or email me.

    Just like last time, we would love volunteers who participated in beta 1 to mentor other localizers.  If you’re feeling comfortable with hg and have some cycles, please follow up on this thread and offer your help.  :)

    Finally, many thanks to the localization teams who participated in localizing FF 3.1 beta 1.  Congratulations!  That was the highest number of locales to participate in a beta 1.  We shipped FF 3.1b1 yesterday and you can see the list of participating locales here:

    http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

    It’s a pleasure working with you all, so please ping me directly with questions or requests for help.  I want to hear from you.

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