Are there ideas for locales with small number of contributors?

[Timur]

I'm head of Firefox translation team for Kazakh language. Well, I
think, the word "team" is quite exaggeration since there are only two
of us who translate Firefox into Kazakh. Since Mozilla has switched to
rapid release cycle I'm afraid, we may miss some of these rapid
releases because both of us have jobs to do and families to look
after. I believe this situation is not unique for Kazakh language. I
think every other locale was (or even IS now) definetely in the same
danger of becoming extinct. So how to increase number of contributors
to the locale? Are there any locales with success stories of
increasing nnumber of contributors? What are plans of Mozila to help
such nearly orphaned locales?

Thanks.

[aki...@wippies.fi]

Well, Wikipedia tells us that there are over 16 million people in Kazakhstan. That is three times as much as we have here in Finland. My opinion is that you should inform young people about the possibilities of the world of free software. Students, for example, have much more free time than workers, or at least I have got. You could try to market it for them as a good reducer of stress.

I was 19 when I started as a localizer for SeaMonkey in July last year. In November I started to maintain localizations of Lightning and ChatZilla as well.

I'm sure that you will find someone to continue your job as a localizer.

--
Aki

--
Wippies-vallankumous on täällä! Varmista paikkasi vallankumouksen eturintamassa ja liity Wippiesiin heti!
http://www.wippies.com/

[Axel Hecht]

I want to let this discussion run for a bit more before I comment for
real, just want to jump at the data piece here:

The total population is likely not a good measure here. Internet
population is likely still wrong, but closer, and that's 4 (fi) vs 5
(kk) million, says the CIA factbook.

Axel

[smo]

Note that it is also a question of a workload. In your case (ka)
it looks like you are still catching up (about 2000 words to go).
After that the workload gets significantly lower - at least I hope
so.
However, if there'll be thousand or two words to localize every
six weeks or so, then everybody has a problem.

Having a dependable team is essential, but I have
no suggestions. Praying (g)?

regards

smo

[Axel Hecht]

Data correction no2: Kazakh is kk, and up to date.

ka is Georgian.

Axel

[Timur]

Dear Aki,

I don't know the situtaion in Finland, but here in Kazakhstan young
people are very inert.
We, Baurzhan and I, tried to popularize Firefox in Kazakh on two very
popular internet-sites among young Kazakhstani (yvision.kz and
massagan.com), but without any visible success.

[Timur]

Hi, Axel,

While it's true that Internet population is about 5 mln. in
Kazakhstan, almost all of these people live in cities and towns, and
people who live in urban places mostly speak Russian, not Kazakh.
That's why download counter for Firefox in Russian is so high.

[Michael Wolf]

Timur napisa:

Hi Timur,

I am the only translator for Upper Sorbian Firefox, SeaMonkey and
Thunderbird and Esperanto SeaMonkey and Thunderbird. For Esperanto
Firefox there is an offical team (without me) but I don't know how many
people there are.

As I must do the work alone, I make unofficial translations only. Thus I
can decide myself when I release a translation because I am independent
on the offial release cyclus. The most work to be done is for the first
translation. For the same reason I do not use the Mozilla version
control system but I do the translation and updating work manually.

But I don't know if that can be the way for Kazakh as well because there
are few Sorbs only (ca. 60 000 people), Kazakh speakers are much more.

Regards,
Michael

[Gen Kanai]

If there is a need for more localizers for a specific locale, can we use
the "thank you for downloading" page to request for help for specific
locales that need help? This seems like an easy way to find people who
might be interested in helping.

Gen

--
Gen Kanai

[Pascal Chevrel]

Hi Timur,

I don't have a magic recipe but I can tell you how I found volunteers
for my locale as well as other locales in the past. Of course, some
solutions can apply to your context and others can't but they may be a
source of ideas:

Wikipedia: I looked at who maintain the firefox and mozilla pages for
the locale, if these people regularly dedicate some time to maintain
those pages that means they would probably be interested in being part
of the Mozilla community (plus they have writing skills).

Inventory of Mozilla supporters in your locale and contacting them
directly: people blogging regularly about Mozilla, people maintaining
the Firefox/Mozilla packages in Linux distros, most active people in
open source forums, people twitting in Kazakh about open source,
ex-contributors to the mozilla project in your locale if they exist
(they could be interested in coming back), people that may have
translated add-ons in your locale etc.

Being present at all the open source meet ups I can, for example this
week end I will be manning a booth at Ubuntu Party Paris and one of the
main purposes of the booth is to attract people that could become
volunteers. It is not uncommon to meet people in open source gatherings
that are actually at the event because they are looking for an open
source project to contribute to.

Spreading the word regularly on my blog, twitter account, mozilla
community forums. I also maintain a couple of "Beta test Firefox"
threads in open source forums for Linux distributions, another source of
contributors.

Setting up an IRC channel on irc.mozilla.org for your locale, that
proved to be quite efficient for French and Spanish at least.

Advertising the lack of volunteers on mozilla and mozilla community
websites, for example in the past I found translators after a call for
help in Babelzilla forums, I also often had volunteers showing up after
news items on mozilla-europe.org or short messages placed on about pages.

Also an advice, do not reject people that want help in other areas as
localization (marketing, code, support...), they are necessary to create
an ecosystem around your locale and they can also help on localization
at a later stage, especially for web properties.

There is also the possibility to put a call for volunteers on some key
pages or even in google snippets, we usually don't do that for major
locales because the number of requests would probably not be manageable
by the community but for a small locale in terms of end-users, that
should not be a problem.

As an experiment in geoIP and if our Russian localizers agree we could
also indicate to Russian users from kazakstan that a Kazakh version
exists (I coded that yesterday on https://stage.mozilla-europe.org/ but
I would need you to load the page and confirm that geoIP is working).

Regards

Pascal