L10n:Localization Process

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Our L10n objective is to help you get a community formed in your country and launch as many new languages/locales as we can. This wiki page is meant to give you, as a new volunteer, an overview of what’s involved from start to finish of a new build and then ongoing releases. We try to keep it short and sweet, so what you'll find here is an overview and then links to more detail. This way if you're at the start you can jump to details about starting, same for the middle and end. (This page is about a 5 minute read, but the details are much longer). I am always looking for feedback to make this page better, so if you have something to say good or bad please post to the forum or mail us.

Step 1, Volunteer

A volunteer appears and community STARTs to form. This usually happens when there is a realization that Firefox is missing another language and there is a conclusion that if we form a community we can solve this problem, so we all get ready to turn our will into action. The first step in this stage is to join an existing team or start a new one if there isn't one already working on your language.

Step 2, Heavy Lifting

This is the major preparation and building work that gets your language ready for users. There are many stages however we work with you to get your build to users as early as possible. In fact, we recently changed our build process to enable you to release often and early by building language pack xpi's which allow users to use an existing version of Firefox and download your language pack xpi to change their browser into your language. You can find more details on this as you review the Building stage of the process. By now you've searched to see if you're joining an existing team or creating something new and if you're entering this stage you've concluded that you are starting something new. This also means you should be reading or have read a lot of the documents to give you an idea of what's involved technically to build the Mozilla product in the language of your choice.

Language Packs

This early on, you want to release early and often, and not pay attention to Mozilla release schedules. Language packs act just like Add-ons that offer a different language for the user interface. You can serve updates to your users on your own schedule, as with any other Add-ons. Working on a language pack does come with a slightly poorer user experience, though, so you want to work towards full localized builds.

pre release

Official releases stand out against language packs by having a full user experience in the sense that they're offered directly for download on the official Mozilla.com sites, the installer is in your language (if technically possible, thanks, windows), the migration wizard is localized. We ask our localizers to provide localized versions of our in-product web pages for support links and the start page. You will have translated bookmarks and possibly different search engines. Mozilla creates up-to-date versions of Firefox for all official languages on our three major platforms and offers automatic security updates for these.

Mozilla evaluates newly emerging localizations to be included into the release process for official localized builds. We'll do this based on the difference an official build will make to our users. You can see from the differences noted above that this difference will be small for dialects or minority languages, but has a large impact on languages that are mostly spoken as possibly the only language of the user. We will do some technical checks on the completeness and maturity of your localization, too.

As users are using a localized build and only that build, official localization teams should work on an all efforts basis to create an equally good localization for a new major version of Firefox. Mozilla's goal is to offer new versions of Firefox (and other Mozilla software) in all languages, or at least be able to do this within the first few minor updates.

Within this stage, we'll be working together to make sure that your localization is hooked up at the right places in our build and release process, and that the hooks within Firefox to external services (read search, web content handlers) are good for your localization, and set up right and in agreement with those service providers. Your job is to make sure we don't break anything in your release ;-)

Beta

We should have resolved all technical issues together and everything should be ready to get you into an official release. Sadly, you never know until you test, so we're moving all our releases through a beta stage. This is the point to reach out to as many people in your community as possible, and grow a testing community. If you need help with testing your localization on particular platforms, Mozilla's QA people will help out. You can also expect daily builds start happening as this is an iterative process to get a candidate for final release

Step 3, Official release

At this stage, all your testing reports have come in, bugs that may have been found got fixed. When this happens, your build will be offered to people coming to the main Mozilla site as one of the drop down language choices. Now it's time to take a step back and party :-)!

The END is also the beginning. The Mozilla project gives you room to take Firefox in your region to new heights, to grow your community, get more contributors, and much more. And then there's always the next major release, so you want to follow the progress of the project. We would also like you to tell other people about your experience so that we can grow our Localizer and Developer community so we can do this all over again :-)