BarCamp Yangon 2011 provided good opportunity to engage localization community in Myanmar. The Make FLOSS Software Speak Your Language talk on the first day of BarCamp was well received. The talk introduced the concept of software localization using wiki-like collaboration tools.
On the second day of the BarCamp the Mozilla Localization Community meetup was held. Some of the mozilla localization contributors participated along few other localization enthusiasts. The goal of this community meetup was to engage the mozilla localization contributors and take concrete steps towards starting new Burmese language localization.
The Burmese multilingual support is hodgepodge of different encoding models and various unicode fonts (Refer Burmese Multilingual support wikipedia page). These problem are both historical and technical, the Myanmar NLP project is spearheading the standardization process. The contributors pointed several technical issues with Firefox Burmese multilingual support. They expressed their willingness to work with the Mozilla developers by reporting bugs and patches.
Ngwe Tun and Steven had already created Burmese/Myanmar (my-MM) Firefox 3.6 Language Pack. These translations should be merged into new locale repository for Burmese locale. The process of starting new Burmese locale can be tracked here (Bugzilla #631921).
Few other ideas that were discussed at the meetup are better co-ordination via a dedicated Burmese L10n mailing-list and getting more people involved in localization using web based translation platform such as Narro and organizing few more community driven workshops at other events in different parts of Myanmar.
