L10n:Localization Process
Mozilla's localization (l10n for short) objective is to offer to as many users as possible Mozilla applications in their language and with a great user experience. This user experience is learning about, finding, installing, using and updating Firefox, as well as upgrading it to a new major version.
Because you are here, we believe you're looking for way to contribute to Mozilla applications in your language and find out what it takes -- you've started at the right place. (However, you may prefer reading about localizing AMO or developer documentation, too.)
The documentation on how to achieve the L10n objectives by getting more involved is split into three parts described below:
- Starting a new localization (↓ below)
- Becoming an official localization (↓ below)
- Maintaining the localization (↓ below)
A typical process of translating Mozilla applications involves:
- Localizing (translating and customizing) the application
- Getting your localization to testers (who'll test the quality of your translations and should offer general opinion on your work)
- Localizing installation and migration (the purpose of doing this is so that user's can do everything from finding to upgrading the Mozilla application in their language of choice)
- Translating web pages linked from the application
- Translating Mozilla websites
We are always looking for feedback to improve this page, if you have something to say good or bad please post to the forum or mail us.
1. Starting a New Localization
Your first step is to try to find other community members already working on localization or willing to help out. You should find them on the L10n:Teams page, which lists the teams by language code. If there is not a team yet, please create a wiki page in the L10n:Teams category introducing yourself, following the examples set forth in the other pages.
The easiest way to let users and testers see your Localization, is to create a "language pack", which is currently hosted within our AMO Add-on infrastructure. By following this route of development (building a language pack) you get all the benefits that AMO brings: you don't have to worry about hosting costs, AMO will serve updates of your language pack to your users (once it passes the review process and is then considered public), you can create a nice description for your language pack, and in your language, too. Your language pack will continue to work during minor updates, because we're not changing our language strings on stable releases.
The negative side of using language packs is that your users won't get a localized install experience of Firefox, including the profile migration dialogs. The in-product webpages will come up in one of the official languages of mozilla.com, bookmarks and search engines will be taken from the build that your users installed originally. If your users decide to upgrade to the next major version, your language packs will stop working, and get disabled like other incompatible Add-ons, until you uploaded a compatible version on AMO again. We are working on improving this process specifically for Language Packs to achieve our objective of a good user experience overall. If you're working on a dialect or a minority language, the disadvantages of language packs are not that bad because the user most likely speaks one of the main languages used by AMO, but for languages spoken by people without a second language supported by the Mozilla community (thus far), getting Firefox out there requires more work.
If you're still willing to jump into the work of localizing, read more at L10n:Starting a localization →
2. Becoming an Official Release
For your localization to be available directly for download on mozilla.com, there needs to be an official complete release rather than just a language pack add-on. Mozilla evaluates newly emerging localizations to possibly be turned into official localized builds. This depends on quality, popularity and other factors.
Doing an official release involves, among other things:
- More translation work (e.g. on installer and migration wizard)
- Doing localized versions of the web pages built into the product, and the start page
- Customizing the user experience by, for example, translated bookmarks, possibly different search engines, etc.
We also get more involved by doing some of the technical checks on the completeness and maturity of your localization. We'll also work with you to make sure that your localization is hooked up at the right places in our build and release process, and that the hooks to external services (such as search and web content handlers) are good for your locale and set up correctly. Once all the additional work is done, we will create up-to-date versions of the product for your language on our three major platforms and offers automatic security updates for it. Your job at this point is to make sure we don't break anything ;-)
Once the official release is completed, your localization will be offered to people coming to the main Mozilla site as one of the language choices. Now it's time to take a step back and party :-)!
Read more at L10n:Becoming an Official Localization →.
3. Maintaining the Localization
We encourage you to take Mozilla Products in your region to new heights, to grow your community, get more contributors, and much more. And there's always the next minor (stability/security) and major release - so you will want your localization to keep track of the progress of the project. We would also ask 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 in another language :-)
Read more at L10n:Official Localized Releases →.