Firefox localization Hackathone

Joseph Bosire

0

localize

On Saturday – 9th July 2011 – the Mozilla Kenya localization team met at Strathmore university in a bid to localize Firefox to Swahili.

The guys present were:

  • Boniface Challo
  • Joseph Bosire
  • Jeff Olwande
  • Victor Nyambura
  • Alex Wafula
  • Thomas Jilan
  • Cliff Argwings

Being our first hands-on localization attempt, we had to start of with some orientation on the localization tools available and the procedure used by Mozilla for localizing products. For localizing, we used Pootle which is an opensource browser based platform for translating software localization strings.

Boniface, a freelance professional translator came in handy during our orientation, having been credited in translating a bunch of software from English to Swahili and also a huge chunk of Firefox to Swahili.

We started of with localizing Swahili’s Bugzilla component – – which simply is for purposes of tracking the Mozilla products being localized to Swahili which in our case currently is Firefox. Unfortunately, a huge chunk of the translated strings had issued and so Boniface advised a postponement of reviewing by the team until he had corrected the strings. This turned into a learning session on do’s and don’ts during translations.

As of now, translations for Firefox 6 have been complete and are waiting to be committed and later officially released as the official Swahili Firefox.

Localization is an ongoing activity and we are looking into getting more localizes for Mozilla; with the help of ANLoc, we are planning a localization workshop for those of you interested in localizing. I’ll be announcing this soon in our various channels so stay tunned.

Pictures: Flickr Stream

 

Alex!!

On Saturday – 9th July 2011 – the Mozilla Kenya localization team met at Strathmore university in a bid to localize Firefox to Swahili.

 

The guys present were:

 

Boniface Challo

Joseph Bosire

Jeff Olwande

Victor Nyambura

Alex Wafula

Thomas Jilani

Cliff Argwings

 

Being our first hands-on localization attempt, we had to start of with some orientation on the localization tools available and the procedure used by Mozilla for localizing products. For localizing, we used Pootle which is an opensource browser based platform for translating software localization strings.

 

Boniface, a freelance professional translator came in handy during our orientation, having been credited in translating a bunch of software from English to Swahili and also a huge chunk of Firefox to Swahili.

 

We started of with localizing Swahili’s Bugzilla component – – which simply is for purposes of tracking the Mozilla products being localized to Swahili which in our case currently is Firefox. Unfortunately, a huge chunk of the translated strings had issued and so Boniface advised a postponement of reviewing by the team until he had corrected the strings. This turned into a learning session on do’s and don’ts during translations.

 

As of now, translations for Firefox 6 have been complete and are waiting to be committed and later officially released as the official Swahili Firefox.

 

Localization is an ongoing activity and we are looking into getting more localizes for Mozilla; with the help of ANLoc, we are planning a localization workshop for those of you interested in localizing. I’ll be announcing this soon in our various channels so stay tunned.

 

Pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/54866403@N02/

 

Alex!!