L10n:Localization Process

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Mozilla's L10n 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:

• Finding Firefox on the web
• Installing Firefox
• Using Firefox
• Updating Firefox
• Upgrading Firefox to a new major version

Because you, what we call a Localizer, 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. This is a brief overview of the typical process involved in translating Mozilla applications:

• 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 (so user's can experience from finding to upgrading in their language of choice)
• Translating web pages linked from the application
• Translating Mozilla websites

The links below explain how to achieve the L10n objectives by getting more involved. (You can also follow these two links in the case you are interested in localizing AMO or developer documentation).

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.

Getting started

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 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 expose your localization work to users and testers is to create, what we call a language pack, within our AMO Add-on infrastructure. By following this route of development you get all the benefits that AMO brings: you don't have to worry about hosting costs, AMO will serve updates to your language pack to your users when they get public, you can create a nice description for your language pack, and in your language, too. Also, because we're not changing our language strings on stable releases, so with the Add-on compatibility rules, your language pack will continue to work during minor updates. [THIS SENTENCE needs work]

The negative side of using AMO is that your users won't get a localized install experience of Firefox, including the profile migration dialogs. For now[is there a link i can insert to WilC or Shaver's blog about this], the AMO in-product webpages will come up in one of the official languages [insert link to list] 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 [link to any blog posts? or maybe status pages with notes about this] 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 [WHY?], but for languages spoken by people without a second language supported by the Mozilla community (thus far), getting Firefox out there requires more work.

There is a detailed description of the L10n:Localization_Process_Start with links to further documentation and tools in hopes you are still willing to jump into the work of localizing :-).

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 (Mozilla Corporation people) 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 ;-)

The L10n:Localization_Process_Middle describes the necessary work and the steps we'll be taking together in more detail.

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 :-)!

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 major release - so you will want your localization to keep track of the progress of the project. The L10n:Localization_Process_End talks about this in detail. 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 :-)