Another post in our Awesome L10n Communities series. This week we’ll introduce you to the Slovenian L10n community, led by Matjaž Horvat.
How did the community get started?
The community got started in July 2002 after I sent this email to the Linux User Group of Slovenia mailing list. Aleks, Urška and some other people joined quickly after that and a few months later we had the whole Mozilla Application Suite 1.2.1 available in Slovenian.
What are some unique language & cultural challenges your community faces?
Slovenian has three grammatical numbers. In addition to singular and plural, we also have dual, which only exists in a few modern languages. Being a small country and sharing borders with Italy, Austria, Hungary and Croatia, we also have strong dialects in Slovenia. For example, the difference between my dialect (Prekmurščina) and the official language is much bigger than among the Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian languages.
How do you find new contributors for your community?
We don’t, they find us! 🙂 While this might be a joke, there’s also some truth in it. Brian King and I were the only members of Mozilla Slovenia for some time and then Vito Smolej and Nino Vranešič directly approached us, one after another. We never met before. I don’t think there’s a general recipe for getting contributors involved with Mozilla. They will find you themselves, but only if you document your activities, write blog posts, reach out to people via social media, talk to the press, etc.
When you find new contributors, what sort of best practices do you train them on?
We’re only four people with three native speakers, so we don’t have much experience in that particular area. 🙂 After we teach them how to use the tools, we try to make sure their translations are consistent with the existing ones. Transvision is a great resource for achieving this, so I’d like to thank Philippe (who made it happen) from the French community!
If there was one thing your community would point to as the community’s greatest achievement, what would that be?
Making Firefox the number one browser in Slovenia for almost five years now! A great localization was crucial for that.
What is the role of communication in your community?
Internally, we mostly talk via our mailing list and a few months ago Vito started our regular Skype meetings approximately every two weeks. They turned out to be a big success. When reaching out to people, we use our website, Facebook page, personal blogs, and we try to talk to media as much as possible.
What are you most looking forward to accomplishing this next year?
Having Firefox mobile available in Slovenian. And Boot to Gecko, too!
If you had one piece of advice for new L10n communities, what would it be?
Be vocal. It brings users and contributors.
Vito Smolej ( wrote on