(This is a crosspost from my blog: http://informationisart.com/7/)
This is the first localization update about Boot to Gecko and Gaia, where I’ll be summarizing the development and the progress of the localization plan for B2G.
There are a few tracks in which the work is taking place in parallel. As Gaia can be thought of as a collection of HTML apps, we needed a way to localize web content on the client side. This is actually something we’ve never done before—our web pages are normally localized on the server side. So the first task was to develop a way to show localized content in HTML by using JavaScript to replace original strings with their translations. This work has been done by Kazé and the library he wrote is available on github.
Kazé based his work on the .properties format which is widely used in other Mozilla products. We want to be able to leverage the existing localization infrastructure like Elmo and make it possible to use many different translation tools like Mozilla Translator, Narro and Translate Toolkit and Pootle. I’m working with Kazé on making sure his work is compatible with the existing localization ecosystem.
We will also soon need localized builds for testing purposes, both for devices and desktop emulators alike. I filed bug 766962 to let the Release Engineering team know about our requirements.
At the same time, the User Experience team is hard at work finalizing the wireframes and the interaction designs for all Gaia apps. This is a great moment to start reviewing these designs in terms of localizability. All apps can be found on the Gaia wiki, e.g.
wiki.mozilla.org/Gaia/Clock links to the Clock app interaction design spec (pdf).
I posted a call for reviews in mozilla.dev.l10n earlier today. If you have a moment, feel free to take a look at the interaction design PDFs and respond with your thoughts in the newsgroup. Starting the reviews so early will help us flag potential localizability issues and fix them in a timely manner.
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