It’s been a few days now after the Mozilla Balkans 2010 first ever meet-up in Skopje, and all I can say is that I’m gonna remember only good things – because there were no bad ones! The very process of organizing this event made some of us thrilled about it, even a few weeks before the actual event. We all hoped that we’re gonna experience something good, and we experienced something awesome.

Photo credits: Emil Stanchev

On the first day, we had a pretty productive internal meetings, discussing about almost everything related to promoting, metrics and communities in general. The best thing about it was that almost all sessions were interactive, so this is basically the only time and place we had in years to tell every thought of ours, to argue about this and that, and to hear other people’s opinions. Face to face confrontations while discussing ideas about various Mozilla projects made it several times more funny than we’re all used to. After all, we’ve came up with a set of goals for all communities, and hope that we can achieve at least portion of those, so we could gather up once more, and set some new goals.

Second day in Skopje, public day event, was a story all by itself. A lot of sessions in front of all of us, a lot of interesting questions for Mozilla Staff, and a lot of fun. We had sessions about Mozilla in general, localization, add-ons, drumbeat projects, development, etc. What I noticed about those sessions, is that everybody were all ears, swallowing every word out there. Although there were not as many attendants as we predicted at first, I’d say that those who attended this event, were more than enough to make this thing happen and feel the joy while presenting Mozilla’s mission and its projects.

As traditional rule on Mozilla events says, we needed to finish up this awesome gathering with `kafana`, just to made that weekend even better. Some of us were having fun, the others were having a lot of fun; I don’t actually remember anyone rejecting a glass of rakija. We’ve had some pretty girls, we’ve had a lot of handsome geeks (led by handsome camera guy), great band playing Macedonian/Serbian folk songs, and we also taught a few geeks how to play oro.

All in all, this meeting is something that, I’m sure, a lot of us will remember the whole life, and all of us are proud that we could be a part of such a nice crew.

Hi Seth. Can you tell me a bit about yourself, how you got into working for Mozilla and what were your first tasks?

Sure. I first started working for Mozilla back in 2006 when I was asked to start Mozilla’s Community Giving and Empowerment program. With the help of Asa Dotzler, I was able to launch a program to help members of our community with reasonable levels of support that would both assist and amplify a volunteer’s or a community’s contribution to the Mozilla project. Because so many of our community members had their beginnings in the localization work, I learned a great deal about localization and the needs of the community. It was clear that Mozilla should formalize even further the localization-drivers team to increase our focus on the global distribution of Mozilla applications and websites. Because I had much exposure to our volunteers, I was asked to help lead the l10n-drivers team.

Can you compare the importance of localization against some other parts of a complex projects like Firefox?

From a technical standpoint, someone could argue that localization is not as difficult as hacking on the Mozilla platform code or doing php web development, and they would be correct!  However, that is a bit like comparing apples to oranges because localization is incredibly important to the release engineering process at Mozilla.  If we were not able to localize our code, our global audience would not have as rich a user experience as they do now with a localized product.  Localization touches many parts of the release process along the way to final release, including the user interface, QA, and build.  Therefore, our localizers often have to wear many hats, understanding how to translate the language of the user interface, how to access nightly builds, how to read html and php code, and how to test the versions ready for release.

How do you see the localization in the future, in terms of a popularity among localizers and its complexity?

I think the localization of Mozilla products has gotten easier in the past two years, with more tools, reporting, and documentation available for localizers to use. I also believe that it will continue to get easier. But, the important fact here is not to eliminate choice. Our volunteers should be able to choose how they want to localize products and websites, whether using a “slick” webtool or using a more technical code editor. The point is that we should make hard things easy and let everyone experiment and participate as they choose.

Can you tell me, based on your experience, can we expect more and more localizers, and what do Mozilla do to attract new contributors and to promote using the localized builds of its applications?

We work very hard to continue to attract new localizers. This takes a combination of steps. The first step is to work with local communities to help build contributors. If a local community wants to actively build new contributors, we need to work with them to push that authority to them and to the edges to make sure they are empowered to do so. We are in the midst of planning one such event now with Mozilla’s “Inter-Balkan Meetup”. The second step is to build tools for better localization. This includes improvements to our infrastructure, documents, and tools for translation. New localizers do not always know exactly how our process works. So, we need to create a clear path for them to engage and learn how to contribute. With those two steps in combination, I think we will always be adding new community.

What does Mozilla do to improve the ease of translation for its localizers?

One very specific step we have taken is to implement tools like Verbatim. If a localizer visits http://localize.mozilla.org, he or she will see all the open web projects needing translation for various languages. This brings the work flow and avenue for participation to the localizer in a fairly understandable and clear way. Secondly, we try hard to furnish up-to-date statistics about the state of product and web localization through our dashboards. Localization communities can always see the status of various projects (including how many strings are needing translation and where they are located in the code base) by vising this URL: https://l10n-stage-sj.mozilla.org/ If we continue to enhance our tools and streamline our infrastructure to provide to our localizers the most timely information and statistics about work needing to be done, we will continue to make the process easier.

What message would you send to all potential localizers reading this?

Give localization a try!

• If you speak a particular language, check out what needs to be done at the Verbatim URL: http://localize.mozilla.org.
• Contact the locale leader for your language. You can see who the locale leaders are for various language teams here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/L10n:Teams
• Email me if you have any questions. You can find my contact information at my blog: http://blog.mozilla.com/seth

We always look for new contributors and welcome anyone with any level of experience to participate.

As many of you already know, we’re planning an Mozilla Inter-Community meet-up on Balkans, in Skopje, the capital city of Macedonia. Among many discussion topics we had past month, I’d like to write about a one we need help with.

On the Balkans:2010 wiki page, you can find a lot of info about this forthcoming event, as well as a link to a page with logo proposals. Of course, we’re going to use Mozilla Communities logo, but we wanted to add something to (or around) it so we can have something unique for all Balkans’ communities. So, if you have some graphic designing skills, and are eager to help and contribute to this event, you’re free to check up on our proposals and create and submit some too.

Mozilla Communities

We all agreed that we shouldn’t involve symbols of the countries, because no one is here to represent its country – we’re all here to represent and promote our local communities and to follow Mozilla’s mission. Another thing we’d like to see is the 3 dinosaurs logo, and to possibly have it as essential part of the graphic we’re going to use on our T-shirts and fliers. So, maybe the best way to do it would be to add some text to MCS logo, or some tiny graphic somewhere around it. Anyway, idea should be all yours, and all 10 Mozilla local communities from Balkans would be grateful. You will also get a T-shirt and a thank-you-letter signed by all Mozilla lead community members and Mozilla Staff attending the event.

If you have any proposals, you can register an account on Mozilla Wiki, navigate to logo proposals page, and attach your graphic. Or, if you’re too lazy to do that, you can just visit contact page and send me a link to your design(s).

Whether you do or do not participate in this, please share this post on Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace or wherever you can. That way you’ll help us get a logo that we deserve. Thanks!

As I already said in some of my earlier posts, I see the localization as one of the most important things out there. Although I’m writing this blog in English, I do and always will support having localized applications and documentation for it, so non tech-savvy users could enjoy using them with flavour of all its features. Of course, as much as the application a one uses is good, the localization gets more on importance.

On the other hand, it looks like most of the tech-savvy people in Serbia do not agree with aforementioned statement. As some of you might know, I’m the Mozilla Serbia community leader, Web Localizer, Firefox localization peer and Mobile Firefox localization coordinator. Mozilla localization team allowed all lead localizers to have a brief stats on how many Firefox downloads we had last week, and what’s even more important, what percent of those downloads are actually downloads of localized versions of Firefox.

Last week I took a look at those statistics, and noticed that more than 60 percent of Firefox downloads from Serbia belongs to en-US locale, or the default one. That is something that worried me a bit, because we have Firefox localized in Serbian for several years now, and by now a one would expect that more than 70 percent of people in Serbia using Firefox, to actually use it in Serbian language.

I crawled the web a bit these days, and saw that many Serbian website’s web-masters tend to link to official Mozilla website rather than to Mozilla Serbia community website or even official Mozilla website in Serbian. Also, I asked a few of them if they could change the links with an brief argument, and believe it or not, always got the response saying that they DO NOT SUPPORT SERBIAN LANGUAGE ON THE INTERNET. Now, that got me amused, and made me wonder what could cause such a thing, and how should we treat it. So here’s the thesis:

Why would a man/woman from Serbia one prefer English over Serbian(in apps)

• People got used to English
• Some of them are not actually reading the whole strings, but can recognize them by reading first few letters
• Some translations in Serbian may sound weird or funny

So, now we came to the point where we should ask ourselves the following: “How to change that, or how to convince people that can change things that we should really encourage users to use native language?”. There is no simple nor ultimate answer that can explain the process as it should be done. The first thing is the root, and if we’re talking about Firefox(I am), than that is Mozilla. I have noticed that Mozilla actually cares about this, and is trying to promote both localized versions and local Mozilla Communites, to help localizers their “product” is seen. We can see a link to Mozilla Serbia local community on Firefox Support, Thunderbird Support, SpreadFirefox…

Another thing that we could do, is to advertize the localized version of our product to users coming from Serbia (using GeoIP tech) and are using Firefox in en-US locale. The pages on which we need this the most are the ones you get when you start Firefox after installation or upgrade process. That’d, in my opinion, significantly improve the percentage of usage of localized Firefox. Also, we need to spread the word, to ask wherever we can and whoever we can to promote the localized Firefox for the sake of all newbies that will and are using Firefox.