L10n:Localization Process

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Our L10n objective is to help you launch as many new languages/locales as we can. This wiki page is meant to give you an overview of what’s involved from start to finish with links to more detail.

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

STARTs when there is a realization that Mozilla is missing another language and there is volunteer who is willing to do the work. The simple steps are:

• Join an existing team or start a new one (if there isn't one already working on your language)
• Register, so people know you are working on it and can contact you
• Check out the en-US tree
• Clone it
• Edit the resulting tree to translate all the strings (perhaps with tools)
• Run some tool which bundles up the result into a language pack
• Ship it to some friends to test it
• Check in the result, and iterate.

Step 2, Preparation and Building

There are several stages and we will work with you to get your build to users as early as possible. As a new localizer we recommend building a language pack first:

Language Packs

• Release early and often,
• You don't need to pay attention to Mozilla release schedules
• Language packs act just like Add-ons that offer a different language for the user interface
• 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 Beta

• Mozilla evaluates newly emerging localizations to be included into the release process for official localized builds.
  • We will do some technical checks on the completeness and maturity of your localization.
• 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

• all technical issues should be resolved and everything should be ready to get you into an official release.
• reach out to as many people in your community as possible, and grow a testing community.
  • Help is provided by Mozilla's QA people
• Daily builds start happening as this is an iterative process to get a candidate for official release

Step 3, Official 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.

• localizers 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.

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 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 :-)