For years now we have been wondering (and asking with insistence) how we translators shall provide locales for jetpacks. Owing to Alexandre Poirot aka ochameau on #jetpack (thanks Mozilla for having found and trusted the right man for this mission), this might be the final answer.
First thing that is quite satifying for translators: the locale format will be good old .properties, which is robust and familiar among us.
Second thing is: testing jetpacks with fresh locales (once translation work is done) does not require any technical ability (no special script nor command line is necessary to inject the file). All you have to do is play a bit with one special extension which does the job seamlessly for you.
But please try by yourself and enjoy:
1. Install this version of Collusion extension on your Firefox – No browser restart necessary.
2. Download this en-US.properties file and translate it in your own language with one correct text editor (remember UTF-8 is your friend and no ominous BOM please). Name your file as {MylangCode-prefix}.properties, e.g: “pt-BR.properties” or “de.properties”
3. Install locale-updater extension by the incredible Alexandre Poirot. No browser restart necessary.
4. In the addon manager of your browser, spot Collusion in the list and click the “Update l10n” button which is now on the left.
5. A window is opening asking you for a file, choose your xx.properties and send it.
6. Collusion addon is automatically uninstalled and reinstalled with updated localization files. Your lang should appear in Collusion interface. No browser restart necessary.
Some observations
This version of Collusion is patched to use the upcoming HTML localization feature coming soon in Jetpack. It allows to extract strings from HTML page and expose them as plain old properties for the translators. Extension developers are welcome to comment and suggest.
Locale-updater extension is on github: hack and improve as you like it.
Next step: having .properties files from jetpacks submitted here on BabelZilla for easy translation, on the current “old” WTS or on its future Adofex-based version which is under progress. Stay tuned!