Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Amidst fanfare, Firefox-3 dumps Hindi

Mozilla Firefox

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There has been much hullabaloo about the release of Mozilla Firefox 3, but sadly Hindi has been left out of the 46 different languages the popular browser was released in. In a blog post at Lingo24 the author rightly wonders about the exclusion of Hindi when some other Indian languages such as Punjabi and Gujarati were accommodated. The blog quotes a Mozilla spokesman putting the onus on the local volunteers. Hindi language packs, Mozilla said, needed further development. A popular Hindi blogger however recently attributed the issue to the nitpick from the peer group that has had problems with the Hindi localization team. Well such spats are not uncommon in the open source world but it seems Hindi lovers will have to wait longer till the strings are tightened.

Update: Ravi followed up on his comment made on this post, in a blog post (Hindi) and informed that DNA had also raised this issue. All in all, the newspaper report implies that the language volunteers were not motivated enough though "Mozilla admits that compared to other regions, its growth has lagged in India". Mozilla spokesperson Chris Hofmann clarified Mozilla's stand, as follows:
"...talks about motivation is definitely a misquote, it is unfortunate, and I apologies to for any misunderstanding. The question from the reporter was "Why doesn't Mozilla ship Hindi?", and the response was to say that we have worked to 46 different locale teams to get them shipping simultaneously with Firefox 3. We also talked about addons.mozilla.org which host other locales that are in development and some of which should be shipping soon. Our PR folks will follow up with the reporter to clear the misunderstanding around any lack of motivation that was implied in the article which is definitely not true, and the fact that we are very excited about the possibility of Hindi and other Indic languages shipping soon."

3 comments:

Ravishankar Shrivastava said...

Rajesh Ranjan - the guy who is maintaining translations for Firefox is also a frustrated lot - because of ppl handling localizations at Mozilla. Rajesh had submitted Hindi translations to them about one and half year ago, and it had been promised that Hindi will be included with FF2 first and then it will be ported to FF3. And they told Rajesh to do not work for FF3 until it gets included in Hindi. But this never happens. There was a workshop also for FF2 Hindi translations at Sarai Delhi, and FF2 Hindi now have pure, corrected translatios and ready to go with FF - but when? let us see. Similar concern were there also at Bengali language team, since theirs were also not included in FF3 release.

seth b said...

Here is a post I wrote about Mozilla's l10n process.

http://blog.mozilla.com/seth/2008/06/25/199/

Talks a bit about our highly dedicated & motivated community, Mozilla's l10n process, and what we hope to do next. Hope you enjoy it.

Firefox in Hindi, its finally here | Hindi on the Web said...

[...] has finally been able to mend its mistake of dumping Hindi in its major release 3.0. Firefox Hindi is now available (also, Marathi, Bengali and Telugu). Its [...]