Mozilla Product Localisation

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:

• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• Seamonkey
• Fennec

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.

1. Preparing translation files: POT files for any string frozen version of Firefox or Thunderbird can be downloaded from the Mozilla l10n server or you can create it yourself. You can then create updated PO files with pomigrate2. These scripts can help to keep a repository of Mozilla PO files up to date and ready for translation.
2. Translating the PO files: The PO files can now be translated using your favourite CAT tool, like Pootle for sharing the workload in a team or Virtaal to translate off-line.
3. Check for product specific issues: The Firefox and Thunderbird pages describe some of these issues.
4. QA and bug checking: You need to test your build. Probably the best preventative step you can take it to run pofilter's variable, accelerator and escapes tests. Errors that these tests pick up are all capable of introducing potential breakage that is hard to trace.
5. Preparing translation files for uploading: The PO files now need to be converted back to the original monolingual files before they can be committed to the Mozilla repositories. The po2moz tool can be used to recreate the original file structure using the new translations.

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.

• See https://wiki.mozilla.org/L10n:Becoming_an_Official_Localization
• Translate the start snippets

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.

• Mozilla L10n Home
• Localisation policy/trademarks, etc (2)
• Scripts used by Translate.org.za

• Mozilla CVS: Information about localising older versions of Mozilla products that used CVS.
• Migrating Mozilla translations to Firefox: This quick-start shows you how to migrate your existing translations of the Mozilla suite to the Firefox web-browser. The same instructions can be used to migrate Thunderbird.