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L10nForumsForums & feeds on LocalisationOn this page/Sur cette page... (hide) This page is for RSS feeds from mailing lists and websites that relate to localisation in South Africa and the continent. Please add relevant feeds. Mailing lists exist for discussion of localisation in the languages of South Africa: http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=91920 RSS feeds for these mailing lists might be available through mail list aggregation sites like Gmane. Translate.org.za Development BlogAfter 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. We’ve started migrating our translations for Mozilla Firefox 3. The first language migrated is Afrikaans which is still only at 68% translated, we hope to get to 100% relatively quickly. Our aim is to ensure that Afrikaans is part of the official release. Our other languages we will take one by one through the official process. 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. Time to give the Afrikaans Thunderbird translation a spin as it is now an official Mozilla Thunderbird release. Thanks to all the hard work put in by Friedel and Samuel we made it into this release. There was much fixing of bugs to get the access keys correct and to fix some untranslated text. Since Mozilla added the ability to expose language packs on their download page, we’ve decided to get all of our languages there. 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: 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: The South African English spell checker for Firefox and Thunderbird is now officialy reviewed and available for download. 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. Translate.org.za Latest News
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