Camino Localization Community (CaminoL10n)

I just found an option that is probably obvious to many. When you adjust your localized interface layouts using Interface Builder, you have the chance of validating the layout (shift-command-v brings up a dialog). You wil be notified of cases where content is hidden or clipped, or other similar troubles you might run into while stuffing your translations into the narrow spaces set-up for the English version.

So, my advice is to use this feature whenever you check your .nib files, to make sure everything shows the right way.

You can find the installer package provided by our new contributor William Xu, attached to this post. If you read Chinese (possibly as a native language), please download, install it on your copy of Camino and test the quality of the translation, reporting errors here as comments.

If you are working on a new translation of Camino 1.5.x, there are some .strings files that are UTF-16LE encoded, while the current version of AppleGlot only works properly with UTF-16BE files. In order to work around this problem, Wevah has written a perl script that will convert any .strings file it finds into UTF-16BE files. See Bug 382151 comment 7 for the script.

Run the script on the copy of Camino you will eventually place in _NewBase. After the files have been corrected, place that copy of Camino into your environment’s _NewBase folder and run the Initial Pass in AppleGlot.

(Bug 392918 will fix this problem permanently in time for Camino 1.6.)

updated based on information from William Xu

The unavailability of so-called "chrome strings" to Cocoa (the framework Camino is built upon) for translation/localization has been bothering our teams and our international users for a long time.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=248160

The solution for this problem isn't here, yet, but has taken a big step closer lately, thanks to a new patch. The mechanism that will allow to override those strings (that are basically located in Mozilla code inside .jar files, inaccessible to Cocoa's means of translating a package) is finally set up and the strings might show up in Localizable.strings soon.
However, the target for implementing this huge improvement has been set for Camino 2, so Camino 1.6, next major upgrade of the application wil still show untranslated portions.
Here's a brand new bug about this new situation: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=394105

For a very long time I've been the only one able o build the multilingual package of Camino. This is no longer true.
I recently posted a call on our mailing list asking for someone willing to learn the easy tasks required to build the package. Markus stepped up and we had a quick online meeting a few days ago. His work will begin effectively with Camino 1.0.6 and 1.5.1, because I will be on vacation for the first 3 weeks of August.

Thank you and welcome, Markus!

This summer, we'll have a couple of maintenance releases that will fix significant bugs both related or not to the l10n work we do here.

You can find the list of open bugs using the menu on the left or clicking here.

Here's a quick rundown of several bugs:

• Bug 382125 – [l10n] Corrections to localized Chrome strings in Camino DMG
  We are discussing corrections to the already available translations (French, Italian, German). I hope that we can get soon translations from the other requested languages: Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese (previous info)
• Bug 382331 – [l10n] Default browser dialogue's "set" button does not resize well
  This was manually fixed by us and the fix is ready to be included in 1.5.1ML
• Bug 383319 – [l10n] Text not translated in Keychain.nib, elsewhere, in German localisation
  Fixed. Ready to be included in 1.5.1ML
• Bug 382151 – [l10n] Some .strings file are UTF-16LE encoded, instead of UTF-16BE, causing troubles to l10n process on PPC Macs
  

The discussion about this started on the Camino l10n mailing list and Marcello asked me to write down my thoughts on this.
http://www.mozdev.org/pipermail/caminol10n/2007-June/002111.html

Currently it seems to me as Marcello collects all the localized data and repacks them into a Multilingual package based on the English one, which has been automatically created by Tinderbox (according to this article: http://wiki.caminobrowser.org/Status_Meetings:2006-10-11:Agenda)
In this article Marcello mentioned the thought putting all localization data in Camino's cvs.
From my point of view this will do some improvements:

• ability to automatically build a Camino Release, in English and Multilingual
• easier management of translations: if completed they can be moved (automatically?) into the release branch
• easier way of file management for translators

Please take a look at this bug.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=384723

The mentioned string is not used (anymore?), so we can delete it.

I have already made this change for every language included in 1.0.5 and 1.5.
Please update NOW your local working copy (i.e. the most recent one that lives in the AppleGlot environment) to reflect the change, so that the unwanted string will not appear in future localized releases. Please note that the SearchURL file's strings are not processed by AppleGlot (it's UTF8), but the old localized version is automatically copied with every update of the environment.

An interesting discussion is coming out of Bug 384406.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=384406

Markus asks what are the obstacles keeping us from getting into the main releases of Camino (those with only one language - en_US).
The comments point to other places where this has been discussed before and try to give some answers, while keeping the door open for future improvements.

Feel free to comment also here about the subject.

Attached to this post, you'll find the Release Notes to be translated for the next update in the 1.0 series.
Please note that there were changes in the Keychain.nib that require translation. The latest build that you can use for translation can be found here:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/camino/nightly/latest-1.0-M1.8.0/
The deadline for the translation is Saturday, June 16th.

Update: the teams that have translated Camino 1.5 don't have to work on the Keychain.nib file; they just need to send the translated Release Notes.