Middle-Eastern Translators Needed

The BabelZilla community relies on volunteers to localize Firefox addons into a multitude of languages. (as well as Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, and other Mozilla applications) But, people have lives to live, and there are always new and updated addons in need of locales. At the moment, there are quite a few addons in need of skilled translators to join the team. Anyone can speak up and volunteer to help make more addons available in their own language.

In particular, BabelZilla seems to be lacking any currently active translators for Middle-Eastern languages: Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian (Farsi). This is of particular concern because this means that we don’t have anyone to translate into any right-to-left (RTL) locales.

Programmers tend to forget that while most languages have text progress in a left-to-right (LTR) order, the direction is rather arbitrary. Properly handling RTL locales takes a little bit extra work (not much) and often has a list of quirks that need to be addressed. Under an RTL locale the whole Firefox application is mirrored; everything that was on the right is now on the left, and vice versa. Text flows in the opposite direction, unless there’s LTR text mixed in, at which point it can get complicated sometimes. Parenthesis and other punctuation can get mixed up if not properly handled, so a little extra testing and work is generally required to make sure everything runs smoothly.

If you are bilingual in both English and Arabic, Hebrew, or Persian (Farsi), there are plenty of addons that could use your help. In fact, we’d more than welcome any new translators for any language. Volunteer today!

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2 Responses to Middle-Eastern Translators Needed

  1. Pingback: Middle-Eastern Translators Needed | Flagfox

  2. Pingback: Add-ons Update – Week of 2014/02/12 | Mozilla Add-ons Blog

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