[Response from Dwayne. A couple of minor changes made for the translator.
"[DB]" also added before the inline comments.]

Hi Issa,

Great to see that you are moving forward with this. I will suggest that we
conduct some of the dialogue on the Mozilla and .Translate.Toolkit mailing
lists though, as there are many people who can benefit from this.

In fact you are not alone, as the Slovenian team had to perform a
translation recovery and update.

We, Translate.org.za, will be doing some work with Mozilla to help further
improve our tools and make it easier for you to localise.

Further comments inline.

On Sunday, 2008-07-06 at 15:53 +0000, Alf@net wrote:
> Hi Dwayne,
> Dear colleagues and fellow activists promoting african languages on
> the Internet,
>
> We, ANAFA, are now ready to go forward into Mozilla Firefox 3
> localization in Wolof.
>
> As you might know, we already did some work for Mozilla Firefox 2 and
> created an xpi language pack which is available on our website at the
> follwing address:
> http://www.alfanet.anafa.org/en/node/42
>
> As Firefox 3 just released, we have to upgrade our language pack to
> the new version.
>
> Here is the mid-term plan for us at ANAFA:
> 1) Migrate the translations we previously did for Firefox 2 into Firefox
3.

[DB] I would suggest doing this in two steps.

1a) recover your old Fx2 translations and convert to PO
1b) migrate these 2.0 PO files to 3.0

> 2) Complete the translations and build a new "wo-SN.xpi" language pack

[DB] We have tools that can build from version control. I suggest that you
build continuously.

> 3) Once this is done, push forward to get a complete Firefox build in
> Wolof including the Installer and web content.

[DB] Yes there are a number of steps here. You can also now get language
packs listed on the front page.

> 4) Make it official!

[DB] The ultimate goal.

> When we made the Firefox 2 Wolof language pack, we did not use PO
> intermediate files, but rather translated directly the DTD, PROPERTIES
> and other l10n files directly in a text editor (Notepad++ on Windows).
> Now this poses a small problem since most of the DTD files have been
> modified from version.2 to version.3 and we have no clear automatic
> way to merge our previous translations into the version.3 files.

[DB] This should be conducted on the Mozilla list or on the .Translate.Devel
list please. Can I ask you to raise the same issue there? And then others
can follow if they desire.

The simple explanation is this:
1) We get an en-US.xpi that aligns with your translations.
2) We PO files for 2.0 from your old .xpi and the one form 1)
3) We then upgrade to 3.0
4) Translate
5) Use scripts to build your new .xpi continuously.

> Our experience now shows us, better late than never, that we should
> have used PO or XLIFF intermediate files from the beginning. That way
> we could now use the "translate toolkit" built by translate.org.za to
> upgrade our translations to Firefox 3.

[DB] Let's just prevent others making the same mistake :) (Our updates of
translations from 2.0 to 3.0 took about 5 minutes)

> The main problems that we now face are the following:
> 1) We don't want to re-invent the wheel! How could we use as much as
> possible the job that we already did? That is, the Wolof language pack
> for Firefox 2.

[DB] We can make sure that you get 100% recovery. So don't worry but it is
time consuming.

> 2) Also, we absolutely need to translate from French, and not English,
> as the Wolof localizers are not good enough in English.

[DB] Look at poswap for doing that. You might also want to check the new
feature in Pootle which allows alternate languages.

. . .



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