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.

We would appreciate testing of these Afrikaans builds even with such low translation status as it will help identify problems early. All the development builds will be available from:

http://download.translate.org.za/dev/firefox/

You can identify your language from the language code. There are also language packs so you can install a certain language and add other language packs.

There are Mac, Windows and Linux builds.

For now these are all in the sandbox, which means they are in testing and need review.  Please review them, but be aware of the following known issues:

1. Not everything is translated: these are simply migrations of Firefox 1.5 translations to 2.0 so unfortunately these things  are not all translated.
2. Setting dialogue is mostly untranslated: Firefox 2.0 saw a major revamp of that interface, see point 1.
3. All HTML errors are in English: same as above

We would appreciate your help in fixing any of these errors or course.  If you are a professional translator, language student, passionate about your language then you can use our web translation tool to help us add the missing entries or correct any mistakes.

For your download pleasure here are all the language packs:

• Afrikaans
• English (South African)
• Ndebele
• Northern Sotho
• Southern Sotho
• Swati
• Tsonga
• Tswana
• Venda
• Xhosa
• Zulu

Many thanks to all those who tested it.  Friedel picked up a showstopper right at the beginning, phew.  We’re getting a few thousand downloads a week so somebody likes what we’ve done.

To help please:

1. Download and install the spell checker. In Firefox this will automagically install the checker.
2. Thunderbird: you will first need to save the file to your computer and then from within Thunderbird add the checker: Tools -> Addons -> Install…
3. Now use the checker
4. Please provide a review - we need these to go live and of course if you see any bugs please report them to us. You can add them as comments to this posting.

Once again Free and Open Source software demonstrated its power by allowing people to change software to meet their needs, instead of hoping that one day a proprietary vendor might care enough to meet their needs.

Not all participants managed to complete their locales, but 4 of them did and today marks the day on which their locales have been integrated and verified for inclusion in the next version of OpenOffice.org.

OpenOffice.org 2.3 is scheduled to be released in early September and will include locales for:

• Sango - Marcel Diki-Kidiri
• Lingala - Denis Moyogo Jacquerye
• Luganda - Martin Benjamin (and others)
• English (Ghana) - Paa Kwesi Imbeah

For speakers of these languages, an estimated 5,5+ million people, this work has impact in that they can for the first time correctly choose dates and times for their language and country and adjust the behaviour of OpenOffice.org to cater for other cultural conventions.

But more critically in the long term it means that they can now create documents correctly tagged as having being written in that language. For most Africans who do not have locale support for their language they will traditionally write the document in their language while the computer assumes it is written in American English. While this works it is causing inestimable long term damage; search engines cannot find Lingala documents, we cannot draw text from Sango documents to help build spell checkers or do language research. But now for these languages and for users using OpenOffice.org they can create documents correctly labeled and in the future help researchers and users of their content access it correctly.

The event was hosted by the IDRC as part of their broad effort to assist localisation in Africa and was coordinated and run by Tactical Tech.