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Localization

We leverage the Firefox Localization system in order to provide the browser in multiple languages.

The process to build a language-specific version of Firefox is roughly the following:

  1. Build Firefox in English.
  2. Get a language pack for the desired language from l10n-central: https://hg.mozilla.org/l10n-central/
  3. Point the build system to the language packs with the --with-l10n-base option.
  4. Run ./mach build installers-{LANG} to repack the browser for the desired language.

In this project we use the process, but adding a patching mechanism to allow us to update a subset of the strings in the browser. In most cases the Mozilla-provided translations are acceptable, so we don't need to change them.

Our process is as follows:

  1. Specify which language packs to download from l10n-central in our .workspace file. We specify a explicit mercurial commit from their tree to ensure reproducability. These language packs are then downloaded when running ./fern.js use.
"locales": {
   "de": "de1025e5e9a9f831271dc1aa8437aba18a631662"
 }
  1. Create a file at l10n/{LANG}.json. This file specifies the strings in the language pack which should be modified. It is a nested JSON object, where the top level key points to a specific translation file, and the second to the key in that file to modify.

When creating this file, l10n/en-US.json can be used as a base, as this file defines all the strings we change in the default English version of the browser. Ideally, every string changed here should have a corresponding change in all other languages.

The {LANG}.json files are used when ./fern.js import-patches is run to patch both the default strings in mozilla-release, as well as the language packs in the l10n folder.

{
  "path/to/strings.ftl": {
    "key": {
      "string": "Overridden translation"
    }
  }
}
  1. For changes that cannot be patched with this method, standard git patches can also be used to modify language packs. This is done via the same method as patches to Firefox code - simply navigate to the l10n/{LANG} folder, make the desired changes and commit them. The ./fern.js export-patches command will then create patch files in the l10n-patches/{LANG} folder which can be applied with ./fern.js import-patches.

Once a language pack is configured by these steps, the fetching and patching of packs will be handled entirely by fern's use and import-patches flow, as with other browser changes.

Notes

Useful command to look for traslation string rg "private window" mozilla-release -g "*.{properties,ftl,dtd,inc}" -i