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.

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(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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“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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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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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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Have you ever been a part of one of these releases?  Here’s a bit of how it works…

On September 10, Axel made the first call for participation in localizing FF 3.1 Beta 1.  Time went by as our localizers prepared their localizations, dealing with new complexities like migrating all their prior efforts to the new code repository, translating newly added strings, and learning how to use Hg.  We answered questions along the way and helped when prompted.

On September 29, Axel made another announcement about Firefox 3.1, this time calling for our teams to “opt-in” to the official release process for the first beta.  We were down to a few days left and people needed to start sending us their work.

By looking at the L10n dashboard (click on “Fx31x” in the Tree section, and the “35″ in the Result section), we were able to see the locales that were closest to finishing up, but hadn’t quite gotten into the process.  Stas and I started emailing teams directly who were close.  We compiled the teams who had unbroken, green localized builds of Firefox, but who had yet to opt-in to the release process.  Then, we gathered all those who had broken, red builds because they had missing strings.  I emailed each team with updates and asked them to opt-in if possible.

At this point, we started to see the locales roll in.  One can’t help but feel a bit of pride and a little thrill as our localizers stand up to the challenge.  The l10n-drivers sit back and watch.

Then, my mind starts to drift to a galaxy far, far away….

I’m always reminded of this scene in Star Wars. (30 seconds in)

In the clip, all wings report in…red 10, 7, 3, 6, 9, 2, 11, and 5…one-by-one with some excitement and pride.  As we approach code freeze, localizers will chime in much the same fashion.

• “fr locale is opting in, patchset a7c003554f46″
• “please add sk too, changeset f3fb0018a3b”
• “hu locale is opting in, patchset 279d4db75211″
• “es-AR opting-in, changeset e35e14d53ef0″
• “ru locale is opting in, patchset a86d6547da37″

and so on…

And, just like the Jedi master Obie-wan, Axel will drop in a whisper with sage advice along the way…

(best read with Obie-wan whisper)

“…that build has missing strings…”

“…if you get the changeset into my queue, you’re fine, but I wouldn’t fall over if I missed out on this…”

“…you can land, and we’ll tag and release with the given changesets….”

When code finally froze (like a tauntaun on the planet Hoth), we had 36 locales* participating!  I believe that’s the most we’ve had in the first beta of a new version of the Firefox browser.

Congratulations to the localizers!  It’s truly an accomplishment that shows the commitment and dedication of our community.  I’m proud to be a part of it.

* see the comment field…

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