L10n:Starting a localization

START

This document outlines what you should expect in order to start building a new language.

• 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.

As described in the previous page, you can start by building a lanugage pack and work towards becoming an official build. There are known issues with language packs between releases we are working to fix [334136]

For your part, what we'd like to do here is ensure that we provide useful documentation to help you create your new build or to help you get linked in to support an existing team. (You can also check our list of bugs filed in case there's already been interest in the language you want to build).

The next step is to review our technical and general documentation for what is involved.

Building blocks

Please see "discussion" notes about this section

There are many skills involved in a successful new language release beyond just translation and technical. A good thing to do at this stage is decide if you're going to do this alone or try and get some help. In our view, it's always better to try and get other people involved as there is a lot more to do than just translating strings to create a successful release. Co-opting friends and family is a decent start, other localizers also get involved in their academic communities, local open source developer communities, etc. [Axel/L10n: do we have any useful links we can provide here to support this notion?]

The following is a list of additional skills that you might want to find through other people as you progress to the next stages:

• Translations skills: a lot of work is in translating typically from English to your language web and client application content, this is considered a basic thing you need to do to consider your work completed
• Technical/Engineering/Testing skills: this means viewing, editing and reviewing code, to be successful you should understand how the build and release process of Mozilla works, and be passionate about details to ensure that your build is working the way you would expect it to, this is also considered another basic element you need
• Community development skills: it is always good to have more people in the community who can help you, for example, make some product decisions, test your new build, spread the word, and come to build and launch parties ;-). Mozilla is working to better help people build Mozilla communities. More will be coming on this topic [Question: a link to Seth's page or something like it might be good here]
• Marketing and Public Relations skills: once you've built your new version we'll want to help you let the world know that there is a new version available, we are currently working on a "buffet" of items to help you here and will write more on this soon.
• Support skills: (Mic note to Axel/Choffman: need help here)

Now on to the middle stage of the L10n:Localization_Process overview.