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10 Years of German Mozilla releases

Here's is more on my 10 years in the project: Exactly 10 years ago today, on January 1st, 2000, I released the first fully localized Mozilla release or milestone in German.

(I actually posted about its availability 2 hours before midnight my time, but didn't have any place to upload files back then, so I consider the next day the actual release day, when others could upload them somewhere to be accessible to the public.)

Yes, right on the "Y2K day" so many people feared, just 15 days after I posted first on the L10n group and was assigned German localizer, I made a fully localized M12 available to the public - starting a story that is still ongoing, now with a community of German localizers bringing all major Mozilla applications to the largest user base of a locale other than US English, and me still doing the suite part of that, now under the SeaMonkey brand.

To celebrate this anniversary, I added a download page and news story for that release to the German SeaMonkey website today (and the same for M13, which was also still missing).

I almost can't believe I've been serving the German community those builds for 10 years now - and most of that time, I did all the packaging myself, creating language packs and tearing apart en-US binaries to create German one by replacing the L10n files, manually in the beginning, with a script in later years. It's only been now since SeaMonkey 2.0 (including Alpha/Beta) that the Mozilla build machinery has started to produce those for the suite as well and I don't have to run things locally and by myself.

With that, I wish a successful new year ("Ein erfolgreiches neues Jahr" in German) and hope for continuing to serve the community with localized builds for a long time to come!

Entry written by KaiRo and posted on January 1st, 2010 00:00 | Tags: German, history, L10n, Mozilla, SeaMonkey | 3 comments | TrackBack

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AuthorEntry

Tony Mechelynck

from Brussels, Belgium

quote
I remember the first "suiterunner" builds, still calling themserves 1.5a at the time, and my impatience at not being able to lay hands on the Linux version while the Windows version was in plain sight — because they were still being built on your own machines at home.

Ein glückliches neues Jahr, Robert, und — ein erfolgreiches zweites Jahrzehnt: a second decade rich with following / with consequences. :-)
2010-01-01 02:59

guenter

from Hannover

quote
10 Jahre Suite Übersetzung
Danke, Ihre unermüdliche Arbeit hat auch mindestens einem anderen Projekt (K-Meleon) die Lokalisierung erleichtert und so auch ermutigt. Viel Erfolg für die nächsten 10 Jahre einer deutsch lokalisierten SeaMonkey Suite.

THank You, Your untiring effort also helped to localize and gave hope to at least one more Project (K-Meleon). Much success for the next 10 years of a German localized SeaMonkey suite.

guenter
2010-01-01 22:29

Kadir Topal

quote
And just two years later I used your localization as the base for the German Firefox localization. And because of the way MozillaTranslator worked I copied over every single of the 11.000 strings by hand. We didn't know which strings would eventually be left out, so we had to have them all. Well, I'm grateful I haven't had to localize all of them. Thanks a lot, Robert! :)
2010-01-09 13:42

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