Translate.org.za Development Blog

After months of work on getting Firefox 3 out in Afrikaans, I believe we are now almost there. Beta 5, 6 and RC-1 released with Afrikaans, and the feedback so far is quite nice. People have already been bugging us about updating the spell checker, so there are definitely a few people who seem to have switched already (not just testing). Seth Bindernagel from Mozilla is asking for some people that worked on Firefox 3 localisations to write a bit about themselves and all the work that went into preparing the localised versions of Firefox 3. I am quite interested to read similar stories by other contributors, so I’m happy to oblige.

To give people an idea of the timelines, the discussions for translating Firefox 3 Beta 1 started in the middle of November 2007. Considering that we’re only now (May 2008) close to release, this is quite a bit of work - not just the actual translation, but all the planning of l10n issues around the beta releases, organising teams, etc. The Afrikaans team only really started working on translations in the beginning of March. At this time, most of the English text would have been stabilised, so this provides a safe starting point to start our work on without having to redo a lot of work.

Dwayne migrated the PO files for Firefox 2 to the POT files for Firefox 3, and as usual, Samuel Murray did most of the translations, and often under quite difficult timelines, in order to meet the deadlines for specific betas. Beta 5 was the first stage where we officially joined in the testing cycle, and our translations were quite complete and tested for Beta 6. Dwayne and I work fulltime at Translate.org.za in Pretoria (South Africa). I’m a developer and in charge of all our current development projects, including Pootle and the Translate Toolkit. We don’t currently have any funding to work on the translations during office hours, so we all try to get to this during our off hours. When we started with Firefox 3, we (Samuel) had to translate 6 274 words, and had to review 1248 words from fuzzy translations (the total for Firefox 3 is over 26 200 words). This is quite a lot of work to fit in in-between other obligations, but Samuel is not your average translator! Using our updated PO files, his magic tools (mostly WordFast) and translation memories, he reached the important deadlines, and handed over to me to take care of review. We both had to work quite late one specific evening to get the last things done! (Baie dankie, Samuel!)

For non-UI review we mostly use pofilter and poconflicts. Samuel is really good, so luckily there wasn’t a lot of work here. Still it is nice to know that the first translated build will work, and tinderbox will be green after check-in to CVS. Then we do the in-context or UI review, and here it becomes much easier to involve the testing community. Unfortunately resizing dialogue boxes remain one of the biggest time wasters at this stage, while we really want to be reviewing translations. I always sit thinking how nobody had to review dialogue sizes for the 40 000+ strings for translating GNOME. Multiply that with the number of supported languages! (In case you missed it, it is still zero seconds that translators of all languages had to spend on resizing dialogue boxes for GNOME.)

The rest of the work involved work on customising search engines, in-product pages, protocol handlers, etc. Some of these were discussed at length on the Afrikaans mailing list to find meaningful links to suggest on the “getting started” page, etc. I really hope that this will give the Afrikaans users a sense of Firefox being “their own” and hopefully, one day we will hopefully be allowed to provide an official South African English build with equally useful customisations. I was disappointed at what a low priority translations like ours have at some of the web services where we tried to get Afrikaans translations deployed in time for Firefox 3. I really wanted to provide an Afrikaans RSS protocol handler, for example. In the end we will still provide some of the English defaults, but any reasonably translated one will probably take my vote in future.

In future, I really hope we can get more people involved, and also at earlier stages of the whole process. And outside of the products like Firefox and Thunderbird, things like the support website, add-ons, etc. all still need to be translated, so the work is by no means done. If you want to help us do the same for the other South African languages, be sure to get in touch with us to discuss some plans.