Thunderbird Localization and Lightning

[Philipp Kewisch]

Hello Folks,

at the Thunderbird Summit in October, the Thunderbird and Lightning
teams decided it would be a good idea to tighten the integration between
Thunderbird and Lightning. Lightning, the calendaring addon from the
Mozilla Calendar Project, is one of the most popular Thunderbird addons
with over 1.2M users. One of the action items was to improve the
localization and the process around it. First of all, please apologize
if you are receiving this email in error, I've found the teams to
contact by comparing between beta Thunderbird localizations and the
Lightning 3.3.3 release. If you are already plan to localize Lightning
4.0 for Thunderbird 38, you can stop reading now.

Also, I've mostly contacted the first person in each team list. If you
have someone on your team that takes care of Thunderbird localizations
or anyone else that might be interested, please forward.

Now comes my request: could you imagine translating Lightning in
addition to Thunderbird? While the initial translation might be a little
work, the volume of string changes between releases is not particularly
high. In fact, from what I can tell we have actually been removing
strings. The upcoming Lightning 4.0 (May 2015) currently totals at 1936
strings, Lightning 3.3 (Jul 2014) has 1949 strings and Lightning 2.6
(Oct 2013) had 2103 strings. There are also strings that are fairly
trivial like Weekdays, and a few more where you can profit from
translation memory. You can use pootle for translations, all you need to
do is have it enabled. I can help with that if needed.

For current localizers there is some confusion with regard to sign-offs.
To include Lightning in a release, you have to sign off on the
Thunderbird l10n dashboard and make sure you pick the later of the two
commits (Thunderbird/Lightning). If I can convince everyone to translate
Lightning, it will be easier for everyone since we can just include
Lightning directly in the Thunderbird l10n config and we don't have to
do any special matching. Sign-offs will be straightforward, no confusion
left.

Regarding deadlines, I'd love to hear your opinion as soon as possible.
Maybe you can reply in the next two weeks. This doesn't have to be a
commitment that you will translate all strings right now, but I'd like
to hear if you could imagine doing it or if you are strongly opposed. If
you do decide to help out and translate Lightning, strings for
Thunderbird 38 and Lightning 4.0 will be frozen on February 23rd, from
which you will have about 12 weeks until the final release occurs.

Even if you can't manage the translation in time for Thunderbird 38 /
Lightning 4.0, your work towards translating Lightning would still be
appreciated. Even if its only ready for a later release, like the next
major release after (Thunderbird 45) or a beta inbetween, doing so will
help make the translation process more transparent for all Lightning
localizers in the long run.

I am excited to hear from you, let me know what you think.
Philipp Kewisch
Mozilla Calendar Project