• Friday night in SF – Saturday morning in Manila – Same time on the Web

    March 20th, 2010 by seth bindernagel with 3 comments »

    ==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:

    1. 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).
    2. 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.
    3. 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==

  • An experiment to integrate Silme with Narro

    May 22nd, 2009 by seth bindernagel with Comments Off

    Many of you know Romi Hardiyanto as our Indonesian localizer who has helped grow Firefox’s market share in Indonesia to 50% since he started localizing in 2007.  Romi is also a dedicated Mozilla contributor who recently hosted a terrific add-ons workshop at the Information System Department Park, ITS Campus in Sukolilo, Surabaya, Indonesia.  (But, I know you’ve read Gen’s post about that.)

    Recently, Romi responded to a Google Summer of Code idea I had posted about helping to enhance Mozilla’s dashboard.  The l10n-drivers knew that this project was a bit of an imperative, so we decided to take on development within our team before we had any guarantee from GSoC if our proposal would be accepted.  (Some blog post about the dashboard vision and progress are coming from me and Axel.)  Given the amount of ambiguity on the resources Mozilla would commit to the idea, the GSoC proposal was rejected.

    But, from the ashes came an idea to do a similar summer of code style project within Mozilla.  What if we could redirect Romi to do another experimental project that would have some benefit to the localization community?  Could Romi contribute to Silme by working on an implementation?  In the past, we’ve supported some of our tool authors with funding and development resources.  It turns out that Narro, another tool used by many of our localization teams, seemed like a good fit for the experiment.  Voila, a new proposal took shape.

    I am pleased to announce that Romi will be working to integrate Silme, a library of localization scripts created by Gandalf, into Narro.  With Silme integration, we should be able to get exports of translated strings from Narro that are file-type independent (because Silme does that nicely) and can be used by the localizers and l10n-drivers to smooth out any commit bugs when it comes time to push changes back to the l10n code repositories.

    Why is this important?

    I’ve blogged in the past about the uniqueness of Mozilla’s DTD and property file types.  Our file structure and file types can create conflicts with the output people who choose to localize with tools send to us.  With Silme integration, we’ll have something that maps a bit more nicely to DTD and property files with less conflict.  You can read more about Silme on Gandalf’s blog, including this wiki page that describes what features we hope to add in the 0.7 release.

    The early challenge for Romi’s project is going to be embedding a Python interpreter into Narro’s PHP code base  He researched a bit about PECL and will blog soon about his findings.  If you can provide any ideas on how to do this, Romi would love to hear your remarks.  We also have some stretch goals to hit if Silme gets integrated into Narro, and Romi will continue to blog about his progress, and those goals, over the next couple months.  Please welcome Romi when his first post to Planet appears and provide any advice you might have.