L10n:Localization Process

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End to End Firefox Localization Process Overview

Our L10n objective is to help you get a community formed in your country and launch as many new languages/locales as we can, our current goal is to get to 100. 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 file a bug [Question: what's best route for feedback?] .

Very simple overview

The 5 step process to localizing Firefox. Click on the links to get the more detailed view:

1 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.

2 Preparation for creating your language begins and this means you've entered the MIDDLE of the process

• By now you've searched if you're creating something new or joining an existing team and you've 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. This stage is the heavy lifting of creating your build, and we're here to help you as much as possible.

3 Localizations gets plugged into our build/release process for automation

• This is a nice time in the sense that you don't need to do much if any work to maintain your build. Once it gets plugged in all new minor releases are automatically updated. Your job is to make sure we don't break anything in your release ;-)

4 Builds are prepared for final major release and testing (what we refer to as Beta)

• During a major release e.g., Firefox 3 (and not release 2.0.0.4) we will ask you to fix bugs, get ready for many reviews, get plugged in and prepare yourself for the work required to ensure your code makes it into the tree for that major release
• You can expect daily builds start happening as this is an iterative process to get a candidate for final release

5 "Releases happens" for your locale - the END

• When this happens, your build will be offered to people coming to the main Mozilla site as one of the drop down language choices
• We like to celebrate success at Mozilla so we typically try to organize world wide parties to mark a major release. For Firefox 2 the team in Paris organized a huge party where people had lots of fun
• 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 :-)