How I got involved with Mozilla's Armenian localization and we shipped it :)

I have been asked how I got involved with the localization process and I would like to have a post so I can always make reference back to it.

It was back at the beginning of 2007 when Dave Humphrey taught during Seneca's study week how to Dive into Mozilla. After that, he encouraged us to take on a project and push it forward. Most of the projects sounded scary, I lacked technical confidence and were not important to me. The only project that caught my attention was to translate Firefox into Armenian. My grandfather had recently started using the Internet and I was hoping to make him happy by making the browser to be in Armenian (his mom's tongue). My major problem was that I did not read/write Armenian so I had to teach myself. The other problem I had was that the localization process was convoluted with wiki pages and lacking a Mozilla supported web tool.  I left the project for a while as I undertook the development of a localization tool.

It was during the summer of 2008 that Robert Sargsyan contacted me and soon after we managed to get him an approver's account on Narro (a web tool for localization). 


During 2009 there was a long silence but Robert kept on working hard for all those months. In September, we setup a Mercurial repository on bitbucket and figured out all issues and imported the translations from Narro.


Early in 2010 we opened a registration for the Armenian team and created a language package for Firefox 3.6 while we waited to receive the approval. On August 2010 the first import landed and on November we managed to make it for Firefox 4's beta 7. 


Since then you can download Firefox in Armenian in here.


My grandpa never got to use Firefox in Armenian as he passed away before that but I bet many other grandpas will be able to.

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This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.