Here is a small FAQ about the partial localization of mozilla.com for the Firefox 2 release.
There is a copy of this FAQ at this address: Online Localization FAQ.
The Online copy of this FAQ will be updated if we feel it is necessary to add information not included in the initial version of the FAQ that comes with the archive files provided to the localizers.
There are 7 short pages to translate, each of them in a folder which are:
/about/index.html /central/index.html /community/index.html /customize/index.html /firstrun/index.html /help/index.html /whatsnew/index.html
There is also a list a short list of common words to translate that we may use in the site interface, these strings are listed in the vocabulary.txt file and you should just put your translation under the English string above (without the ; at the beginning), here is a sample example with strings translated into French:
;About Mozilla À propos de Mozilla ;Contact us Contactez-nous ;Mega-Bytes (MB) Mega-octets (Mo)
There will also be a list of Google snippets that will be displayed on the Firefox-Google search page but they are not written yet.
These pages are called the 'in-product' pages. They are all the official entry points a Firefox user is likely to stumble upon when installing/upgrading/using Firefox. These pages are either linked in the default Firefox 2 bookmarks or linked directly into the software for welcoming pages like 'you have just installed Firefox' or 'you have successfully upgraded Firefox'.
There are also a few strings to translate that will be used on the Google-Firefox start page to replace the old ones, these strings are not available for translation yet.
If your language is not a language fully included into the current Mozilla Europe, or Mozilla Japan regional portals, and if there is no last minute addition to the content, you don't have anything else to translate for the mozilla.com portal.
If your language is fully supported on one of the regional languages (like German or French on the European portal), then there are also product pages to translate so as to promote Firefox to the people who currently use another browser. This localization work will be done as in the past via the European/Japanese/Chinese localization teams using the usual process.
This is indeed planned for early 2007.
You must use a text editor saving files as unicode (UTF-8). Do not use a Wysiwyg editor such as Nvu since these tools mess with the HTML code and we would have to clean the files you send
There are many text editors and everyone has his favorite tool, just use the one you are confortable with. Personnally I use jEdit which is Java based because I like to use the same tools on Linux and Windows, but the standard editors in Linux distros such as Gedit or Kate are perfect for the job, on Windows, Scite is a small yet powerful text-editor with UTF8 support.
Actually, you don't really have to know HTML since you shouldn't touch the HTML parts of the files, only the text. If HTML scares you, you can just translate the text only version of the files which are located in the /text_version/ folder and I will put the HTML back on the text.
There is only one HTML attribute that you may want to change, it is the language code for your language, it is located in the second line of each file like this :
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
If your language is Portuguese, you may put the Portuguese language code to replace the en parameter like this:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="pt" lang="pt">
Note that right to left languages like Arabic don't have to worry about the <dir="rtl"> attribute, it will be added by the server for them.
We are currently setting up a staging server that will be accessible via SVN, all the people that want to have an SVN account should contact me (pascal.chevrel AT mozilla-europe.org) to get this account and indicate what username they want to use.
You can add these links in the following pages :
/about/index.html /help/index.html
You will notice that there is a placeholder for those links indicated by the text [regional resource] or [insert other appropriate resources and links as needed], you can use this links to put relevant help in your language, like the big Mozilla community portals, equivalents of Mozillazine in your language... Please do not put extensions sites !, we are currently transforming addons.mozilla.org into a multilingual portal with security checks so as to make sure that all the extensions there can be trusted as spyware free and of good quality.
The official extension site is being rewritten, one of the objectives is to turn it into a multilingual extensions site, hence the URLs in the form of <a href="http://en-US.add-ons.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/">Firefox Add-ons</a>. Although the localization for Addons hasn't started yet (any help is welcome!), it is safe to replace the en-US string by your locale, such as : <a href="http://de.add-ons.mozilla.com/de/firefox/">Firefox Add-ons</a>, there will be redirections to point to the English version if the localized version doesn't exist yet when firefox 2 is released.
You can email a zip archive of the files directly to me (pascal.chevrel AT mozilla-europe.org) or add your translation to the bugzilla tracking bug : [Tracking bug] Localize mozilla.com in-product pages for Firefox 2.
SVN users just have to put a comment in the tracking bug report once their translation is done.
This file is there so as that you can put the names of all the people that contributed to the translation. This is used to validate the fact that you agree to see your translation published with a Creative Commons licence and it will also be used to create a contributors page where all the people that contributed to the portal will be listed.
Yes, I use the nickname pascalc and you can find me in the #europe and #l10n channels in irc.mozilla.org.