Entrepreneur Geek

Incorrect Translations

Upgraded Firefox for my dad, and that led to this screen. Essentially, it says that “Your Firefox has been upgraded to the latest edition”. But the translation to Gujarati changes the meaning. If I were to translate this Gujarati back, it would read “You have been upgraded/improved to the latest edition of Firefox”. C’mon, it’s Firefox that got upgraded, not myself!

Now, it’s my team that’s done most of these translations! These were done by the same people who did initial Utkarsh localization work. I have done translations myself and I know the difficulties to get them right.

But hey, is it time we do a QA on our translations and get them more up to date? More and more Gujarati users are coming online, and we really want to make it easier for them to use the web.

What say? Kartik, Ankit, Shweta? Others?

Alan from our systems team sent me a note about Quillpad. At first, I found the name strange and did not look at it. But I was going through unanswered mails today and looked at Quillpad.

Easy online Gujarati (Hindi / Marathi / Other) typing tool

And I was amazed! It’s a web based editor for Indian languages. You can type from your standard English keyboard, but in your own language. Quillpad will understand what you are typing and give you suggestions. You can select a suggestion using arrow keys and use it by pressing space bar.

This works much like Microsoft’s transliteration keyboard, but has a better transliteration engine. The biggest thing was that it worked right in my browser, without any installation. Its auto completion is the best feature of all and typing in Gujarati was never so easy. Or for that matter, any other Indian language.

Kudos to Tachyon Technologies team!

Mozilla is currently running a “Firefox in your country” survey to better understand how users are using Firefox around the world. The survey is available at:

Firefox in your country – Survey

The survey will take just two minutes to complete. But will go a long way in improving Firefox! It revolves around your use of Firefox and how we can get more people use Firefox.

The survey is coming to an end this Friday!! And we need more participation from India.  Mozilla Foundation will be using this information to make better decisions in the future about how to grow Firefox and Mozilla in India.

I request you to go ahead and fill it up! Make the world a better place by people getting a better browser!

Our own Kartik Mistry is on one of the foss.in/2007 promotional posters! Kartik has been contributing to FOSS for over 4 years now and is active contributor to Localization and Debian.

Congratulations Kartik, and keep contributing!

And there are many other friends in the posters: Gopal, Karunakar, Naba Kumar, Shreyas, Pradeepto, Tejas and Suparna. Good work guys! And good work Hari, on the wonderful posters!

Shantanu told me about a new Firefox add-on he has written a while ago. He also discussed it during the Mozilla Indic meet we had. It’s quite nifty, and I thought I should share it with

1. Create an account on Mozilla if you don’t have it. Login to your account.
2. Check Show Sandbox in Profile and Save.
3. Click on Sandbox on upper left.
4. Search for “girgit”. You will get this page.
5. Install!
6. If you want to checkout the source code, follow the “View the source” link on the page.

Try it out!