Mozilla is the organisation credited with giving the world the Firefox web browser, Thunderbird e-mail client and many more. Most of the Mozilla products can be localised and this page (and pages linked to) aims to be a comprehensive resource of information about this process.
This page gives a broad overview of the localisation processes involved when localising Mozilla products using PO files, the Translate Toolkit and other PO based tool such as Pootle and Virtaal.
Product-specific information are on the projects’ own pages:
FIXME work in progress, we’ll cleanup and retire the other information and the Pootle way will be the only one that we talk about
So you want to translate Firefox into your language. To start is simple, to complete is a bit harder.
Before you begin lets be realistic about how much effort is required. If you can translate 1,500 words a day, like most professional translators, you can expect to complete Firefox in 20 days if you work fulltime. But you will still need to review the translations and perform in product review. So this is a lot of work.
We’re helping to reduce that effort. While you translate we’ll build the files needed by Firefox for you as we do for our South African and African languages. This takes a lot off your shoulders and you can happily begin translating without any knowledge of what happens at Mozilla, the files formats, etc.
We have developed a number of modules that allow you to focus on the most important strings first.
Mozilla products use monolingual translation formats and is further discussed here.
The Mozilla L10n project page contains the rest of the information needed to start a new localisation or join an existing localisation team.
Various dialogues are sized within the XUL work. Often they have entries in the DTD which allow you to change the size of the dialogue. It is a very time-consuming process, but hopefully the bookmarklet and instructions created by Axel Hecht will help you quickly get the correct size to enter into your final files.
For reference:
Put the following text into the location field of a new bookmark (therefore won’t work with Thunderbird): (Make sure that you are not putting in smart (round) quotes produced by the wiki software)
javascript:(function(){var p=2;var cs=window.getComputedStyle(document.documentElement,null);var fs=cs.getPropertyCSSValue('font-size').getFloatValue(5);var w=cs.getPropertyCSSValue('width').getFloatValue(5);var h=cs.getPropertyCSSValue('height').getFloatValue(5);prompt('Dialog size:', 'width: '+Math.ceil(w/fs*p)/p+'; height: '+Math.ceil(h/fs*p)/p+';');})();
Browse to the correct XUL file with Firefox, for example
chrome://browser/components/preferences/preferences.xul
.
Choose your bookmark with the JavaScript and a message box displays the width and height.
This multi locale switcher is best for use in cases where you will have more than one language to install. Even with two it is much cleaner then other locale switchers available.
There are some requirements which stem from the trademark policy. Mozilla products can be released as either an official build or a community release.