Open letter about adding new locales to Firefox desktop

Jeff Beatty

2 responses

First and foremost, thank you all for your interest, hard work, and time dedicated to creating an official localization of Firefox desktop. We aim to help you create high quality localizations of Firefox, because we understand that the quality of your localization work has a direct impact on people’s perception of Firefox in your region. This being the case, we ask localization teams that are interested in creating official localizations of Firefox to follow a strict process, be vocal, and make a commitment to localize each new version of Firefox every six weeks.
In the last few months, we have hesitated to add new locales to the release cycle for several reasons.  In general, we’ve not clearly emphasized the importance of key things in the process. Each of these are important to get to high quality software releases and confirm to us a prolonged interest in participating in Mozilla localization. Here’s what we hope to change in order to better support your interest in becoming an official localization: .
1) we will reach out to you to set progress goals and key milestones for your l10n work.
2) we will follow up with you when we’re unable to clearly see consistent l10n progress or we can’t gain insight into the ongoing l10n work.
3) we will encourage you to be proactive in bugzilla. Especially in the area of filing bugs and following components to help your track l10n work progress and increase visabilty.  It’s critical to interact on the localization bugs that go beyond UI translation and cover “productization.”
4) we will use the mozilla.dev.l10n and mozilla.dev.l10n.new-locales mailing lists to communicate with you more openly.
5) we will work with you to strategically build a l10n team of high quality and high value contributors.
Once again, we thank you for all of your time and effort.

 

2 responses

Post a comment

  1. Ricardo Palomares wrote on :

    Hi, Jeff

    I concur with the outlined process as a way to quickly pinpoint those localizations that do not follow the localization process at the desired speed. Filing bugs and reaching out the owners of those locales with apparent problems may seem added bureaucracy, but it is the best way to stress the importance of localization process and keeping up to date each locale. After all, there are thousands or millions of users trusting in Mozilla delivering new versions in each locale.

    I, however, hope that this does not mean more bugs for locales that consistently are kept synced with en-US on time, either on central or aurora, except when they are needed for p12n or QA. I guess that will not change for “good citizens” in Mozilla L10n place, am I wrong? 🙂

    Reply

    1. Jeff Beatty wrote on :

      Hi Ricardo,

      You are correct. This really has no extra impact on existing official locales. It is mostly to address our lag in adding new locales in the last several months and how we plan to change it. Thanks for your comment!

      Jeff

      Reply

Post Your Comment