MoZH

A proposed platform to resolve Chinese translation problems on Mozilla

Littlebtc,http://littlebtc.blogspot.com/

Current status

• There are Simplified / Traditional Chinese l10n teams– Simplified Chinese is used by Mainland China and

Singapore / Malaysia

– Traditional Chinese is used by Taiwan / Hong Kong / Macau

– Differences:• Simplified <-> Traditional: A lot of terms differences, but

similar in speaking

• Taiwan <-> Hong Kong: Almost the same except some of the terms

Current Problem

• Traditional Chinese teams are focus on Taiwan

• Hong Kong users will get a "foreign" Firefox

– zh-TW Firefox is full with Taiwan websites

• zh-HK l10n team is formed but not approved as of May 2009 (Bug 486686)

• The current problem: There are no efficient ways to cooperate Chinese Teams!

Wikipedia way

• ONE language project for all types of Chinese

• Two types for conversion: – Characters (Traditional/Simplified)

– Local Terms (China/Taiwan/Hong Kong & Macau/Singapore & Malaysia)• Local Terms even included a lot of popular culture

terms (like Harry Potter Terms http://bit.ly/VjhGn)

Raw Simp. Trad.Simplified+China

Traditional+HK/Macau

Simplified+Ma/Sg

Tradiaional+Taiwan

My MoZH propose

MoZHTraditional

TranslationsSimplified Translations

Taiwan

Hong Kong

China

So Littlebtc's MoZH is?

• A metaproject for Chinese projects

– Maintained by zh-CN, zh-TW, zh-HK l10n teams

• An integrated translation platform

– Terms comparison table

– Super-auto-suggest:

新增一張圖片

zh-TW l10ner adds a string…新增一张图像

新增一張圖片

Auto suggests for 2 other locales!

zh-HK

zh-CN

More technically

• The system will still handle 3~4 locales

• But when a translation adds a string, it will be converted and auto-suggested for all other locales

• Locales should have their patches easily stored in this system!

Benefits of MoZH

• Save all's time:– Now, Traditional / Simplified Chinese translation

are not cooperated

– If cooperation and auto-suggest are built, the translation will be much faster!

• Make all Chinese l10n teams focus more on local User experience

• Make every Chinese Computer users have a "Local" Mozilla product

Diffculty of MoZH

• Can we cooperate all of the Chinese l10n teams?

• The translation cooperation system will be a very hard work. Is it worthy enough to build the system?

• What role will Mozilla China act as?

– (Ouch, no more political issues, please)

• Will Mozilla accept this idea?