We had the Mozilla Firefox Localization to Filipino Webinar led by Seth Bindernagel of Mozilla yesterday morning and it was a great session.
Around eleven folks attended the first webinar to tackle Mozilla Firefox localization to Filipino. (Props to John, Kevin, Bob, Joell, Charmaine, Gian, Juned, Marvin, and other folks who made time for the webinar. if you were there, please let me know! 🙂 )
Seth introduced a tool called Narro and it’s a web-based translation/localization tool developed by Alxandru Sasz. Seth showed us how to translate a couple of strings and showed us how to install language packs.
I just realized then that localization was a tricky thing. One phrase we were supposed to translate was “Manage Search Engines” which spurred a little discussion because there’s really no word that directly matches “manage” in Filipino. We agreed on “Pamahalaan ang mga Search Engine.”
One feedback: I hope Narro will be able to show the context of the strings to translate because in Filipino, there are different forms of verbs. Example, the string “Add Search Engine” by itself could mean to add a search engine right now, or an option add a search engine.
One learning I had is that we need some hard-core language and grammar folks to edit and make suggestions for un-awkward versions of English words.
In any case, this is a good first step for the community and we will follow this up with a translate-athon. 🙂
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Seth has a nice blog post on the chronological events that happened during the webinar. 🙂
Rachel Levy
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