SeaMonkey:Localization

This page describes the process of creating a SeaMonkey localization. If you want to use a localized SeaMonkey version, see our localized releases list.

There are two ways to do SeaMonkey localization:

• the old Mozilla suite process used for SeaMonkey 1.x
• the new CVS-based process for SeaMonkey 2

The old SeaMonkey 1.x process

If you want to create a SeaMonkey 1.x localization, use (almost) the same process as used earlier by the Mozilla suite:

• First, look if there already is a SeaMonkey localization team for your language. If there is, please contact the listed owner for how to help. If no team is listed there, edit the page and add your language with yourself as the owner. If you don't know the locale code for your language, read our locale names document and use the "ab-CD" representation (ISO 639.1/.2 (2-letter/3-letter) language code + 2-letter uppercased ISO 3166 country code), SeaMonkey 1.x only supports that variant.
• Second, use some localization tool to translate en-US.jar, en-[win|max|unix].jar and US.jar of the SeaMonkey 1.x chrome/ folder to versions in your language and create a language pack - use either functionality in your tool for that or base it on existing language packs from our localized releases list.
• Optionally produce localized SeaMonkey binaries with those translated .jar files.
• Post to mozilla.dev.l10n for getting the finished language pack and possibly binaries uploaded to Mozilla server as contributed localized files and linked from the SeaMonkey pages.

If you have further questions, please ask those in mozilla.dev.l10n, which is our central hub for coordination of localization efforts at Mozilla.

The CVS-based process for SeaMonkey 2

Starting with SeaMonkey 2 (and its pre-releases), we are using the same Localization_Process as Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird. This allows us to have all localization files in a central CVS repository on mozilla.org, share the translation for the common Mozilla core with the other mentioned applications, and build official release builds as well as nightly builds directly from the repository. The localization there can also use the simpler locale names like "de", "eo", "pl", "cs", etc. This is all in all a big process change, but we now follow roughly the same guidelines as Firefox, laid out e.g. in the create a new localization page - just replace "browser" with "suite" in the Firefox localization documents and this is how it works for SeaMonkey.

You also should read the blog post on SeaMonkey localization written by Robert Kaiser from the SeaMonkey Council when this process was first introduced to SeaMonkey development.

If you also want to get a localized ChatZilla in your builds, your language can be added to the supported list for that extension, as pointed out in the CVS-based ChatZilla L10n packs message on mozilla.dev.l10n.