L10n:Building Blocks

Building blocks

There are many skills involved in a successful new language release beyond just translation and technical. A good thing to do at this stage is decide if you're going to do this alone or try and get some help. In our view, it's always better to try and get other people involved as there is a lot more to do than just translating strings to create a successful release. Co-opting friends and family is a decent start, other localizers also get involved in their academic communities, local open source developer communities, etc. [L10n: do we have any useful links we can provide here to support this notion?]

The following is a list of additional skills that you might want to find through other people as you progress to the next stages:

• Translations: a lot of work is in translating typically from English to your language web and client application content, this is considered a basic thing you need to do to consider your work completed
• Technical/Engineering/Testing: this means viewing, editing and reviewing code, to be successful you should understand how the build and release process of Mozilla works, and be passionate about details to ensure that your build is working the way you would expect it to, this is also considered another basic element you need
• Community development: it is always good to have leaders in the community who can help you, for example, make some product decisions, test your new build, spread the word, and come to build and launch parties ;-). Mozilla is working to better help people build Mozilla communities. More will be coming on this topic [Question: a link to Seth's page or something like it might be good here]
• Business relationship: interested in creating potential contacts for business discussions
• Marketing and Public Relations skills: once you've built your new version we'll want to help you let the world know that there is a new version available, we are currently working on a "buffet" of items to help you here and will write more on this soon.
• Technical writers/Support: (Mic note to Axel/Choffman: need help here)
• Webdev and graphics designers

We think there are a few types of localizers

• Translator non-technical
• Translator who want to be technical
• Translator tech no experience
• Translator technical experienced = localizers now
• Technical experienced
• Technical not experienced

Now on to the middle stage of the L10n:Localization_Process overview.