how to contribute?

[Robert Kaiser]

Hi!

I'd like to help with German translation of Mozilla. How can I do that?
Is there somebody already working on that?
How to contribute so that I don't work hours and be rejected then? (I
already tried some work & I've read all I could find about localization
of Moz with DTDs...)

KaiRo

[Tao Cheng]

Hi, Robert:

Please refer to the document below for how to contribution translation
of the Mozilla client.

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/intl/xul-how2l10n.html

If you have no objection, I'll put you as the German translation
contributor. The upcoming release is M12. You can grab the most recent
M12 development build here:

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/

The final Mozilla build shall be ready in a few days; I don't expect
lots
of UI changes, though.

Please feel free to post questions/comments here. Thanks for your
interest and Happy Holidays.

Regards,

Tao

--
o-------------------------------------------o
| All my opinions are mine; not Netscape's. |
o-------------------------------------------o

[Robert Kaiser]

Thank you - and it's ok for me to be put there as contributor.

BTW, what the correct locale name for German? I started using "de-AT"
because I'm sitting in Austria (Vienna) but there are no differences
between Austrian and German anyway (if we're talking about formal
language...), so I should use the locale name for Germany. What's the
correct name then? "de-DE" or something similar?

You can add the correct locale name to the table, and perhaps some
comment in "Reference build", I think "(M12)" would be best.

Thanks,

Robert

[Christian]

Hi!

> Thank you - and it's ok for me to be put there as contributor.

I started with a Mozilla German translation about two months ago, but
aborted the project because I was told that the guys at Netscape would
take care about this.

I used mozexptool 0.91 by jm...@softcatala.org. If you are interested, I
can send you the glossary with the changes I already made.

[Robert Kaiser]

Sounds good. Can you send me what you have?

I'm no Netscape employee, only a student at Vienna, but if I can do
something for Mozilla I'm glad (without caring about all the programming
stuff, I don't have any C/C++ installed).
And I'm talking about Mozilla, the Open Source browser. I don't really
care if Netscape want to use my German DTDs in their German Netscape 5
browser. If they want to use them, they can - I'd like them to use my
stuff - but if they do not, I don't care.

So you mentioned it was two months ago when you were working on that.
AFAIK, there were major changes in UI structure (a lot of new DTDs, all
strings which should be translated were pulled out of the XUL files)
since then, so probably I can't use parts of what you created - but
please send those things to me - my e-mail is right in this message,
isn't it?

Thanks,
Robert

[Tao Cheng]

Robert Kaiser wrote:

> Thank you - and it's ok for me to be put there as contributor.
>

Done!

>
> BTW, what the correct locale name for German? I started using "de-AT"
> because I'm sitting in Austria (Vienna) but there are no differences
> between Austrian and German anyway (if we're talking about formal
> language...), so I should use the locale name for Germany. What's the
> correct name then? "de-DE" or something similar?

IMHO, a good translation shall reflect both the language and the culture
of the local custom. Therefore, if you can think of certain cases that
different phrases or wordings are used to describe the same thing, I'd
encourage you to produce a de-AT version of the German Mozilla client to
reflect so. I believe that a good localization could make the end users'
life much easier in using the product.

>
>
> You can add the correct locale name to the table, and perhaps some
> comment in "Reference build", I think "(M12)" would be best.

I shall do that the first thing on Monday.

-Tao

>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Robert

[Robert Kaiser]

Another question - and I think it's of public interest:

When do we get a chance to use our own locale folders instead of
localizing in "en-US" folders? I saw that chrome/registry.rdf has gone
but when will we get a different solution for telling mozilla which
locale folder ro use (instead of "en-US")?

[Robert Kaiser]

I've done a lot of work this weekend. Expect a full German version
(everything stored in locale folders will be translated) of M12 (hope it
will be out soon) just after Christmas (Dec 29 or 30, I think).
I've done everything except Messenger and Editor now (for build
1999121612)!

There are still problems with localisation/translation, though - e.g.
some texts not appearing in DTDs, accesskeys stored in XUL instead of
DTD files (it doesn't look good if the stored accesskey is not in the
word appearing on the screen --> no underlined character, see
"View"-->"Ansicht" menu), some DTDs which aren't used, some components
that don't use globalOverlay.dtd - but all in all, minor problems.
One problem looks worse than all the others: In dialog boxes like
password storing for wallet, unicode escaped characters don't work - and
that's quite a big problem for German (and a lot of other languages)
which uses characters like ü (ü) quite often.

And something to laugh about: "pref/pref-offline.dtd", an entity there
says "Commucator can start..." (just look into your offline preferences
dialog). Aren't there some letters missing in the app title???

Robert

P.S.: The missing components will take that long time 'cause I'll be off
my computer for the days around Christmas...