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Localising Mozilla Firefox

Firefox like Mozilla is traditionally localised with Mozilla Translators.  But
for those who invest in in PO files and would rather spend time translating
then learning another tool ... here are the instructions for creating a Firefox
localisation.

Background

This provides instructions for the users of Mozilla Translator:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/l10n/mlp_howto_Firefox.html

Step by step instructions for localising Firefox:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/l10n/l10n-step-by-step.html

This serves as our reference point so please familiarise yourself with it.

Check these

locale/browser/browser.properties: showskinsdescription

Locale switcher

This multi locale switcher is best for use in cases where you will have more
than one language to install.  Even with two it is much cleaner then other
locale switchers available.

http://www.saintpatrickdc.org/bsmedberg/locale-switcher/

Has problems on 1.0PR of Firefox

Packing

Unpacked en-US.xpi using moz2po into templates/

I first migrate Mozilla 1.7.3 to Firefox 0.10.1 aka 1.0PR

Translate all PO files
copy all .rdf files from templates/ to af/
Changed .rdf files to af-ZA delete any with no af-ZA in them
Make customisation changes and "check these" issues

po2moz did not work

copied templates/ to pack/
rm all .pot files
copied all .po files in af/ to pack/

po2moz -l af-ZA -t en-US.xpi pack ready

(this created problems because some items were left out causing crashing)

Then followed this idea:
 unpacked tr-TR xpi
 converted all PO to dtd etc
 unpacked tr-TR.jar cp all af-ZA dtd etc into this directory
 fix all .rdf
 zip jar

 check other items for spurious tr-TR
 zip xpi
 
 done

 Test

Customising

You can change various settings to make the browser more specific to your
locale:

1) Accept language

In intl.properties.po

general.useragent.locale - the locale for your browser eg. af-ZA
intl.accept_languages - the languages that you will request from webpages 
eg "af-za, af, en-gb, en-us, en"

TODO:
default start URL
default search engine
adding search engines specific to your locale
bookmark customisation

Other Things to Localise

This extract of an email from Pavel Franc of the Czech team highlights other pieces of Firefox 
that need to be localised.

The Czech (cs-CZ) Thunderbird 1.0 windows builds are ready.
We do now our QA testing.

ftp://ftp.czilla.cz/test/thunderbird/1.0/

The following files outside chrome were changed in zip archive:

* README.txt ... translated
* talkback-l10n.ini ... translated
+ cs.aff ... Czech spellchecker
+ cs.dic ... Czech spellchecker
- en-US.aff ... removed
- en-US.dic ... removed
* rss.rdf ... translated
* mailViews.dat ... translated
* all-thuderbird.js ... changed useragent.locale

and in installer:
* install.js ... changed locale and transalted shortcuts
* UninstallThunderbird.zip ... translated
* 7zSD.sfx ... translated by ResourceHacker

Packaging a loclalised Max OS X version

http://thunderbird.dnsalias.net/instructions/thunderbird-l10n-OSX.html