In late 1999, working with M11, I discovered that XUL has nice text/code seperation, and tried to dig into it
by changing some strings to German equivalents -
just for fun. Being the first one
to do this for that language, I stumbled into being the leader of the German L10n project and released
M12 German on 2000-01-01.
A lot has happened since then. The small HTML page I made up for downloading that build turned into a
heavily accessed web site, now residing at
mozilla.kairo.at.
In January 2004, that site was accessed by over 740000 different hosts, hitting the main page
just under one million times, the support page (default home page of German builds) had almost 800000 hits.
With 44000 visits of people per day (average), the site produced 20 GB of HTML traffic.
As a student, I'd have some problems paying for the server that hosts all that alone,
and affording visiting FOSDEM as well on my cost would also be not too easy. I'd like to
thank all donators of the Mozilla German project for making it possible
to keep the site up and attend here, and my parents as well for supporting me to come here and spend some time
on Mozilla next to studying.
The downloads are hosted by mozilla.org, universities and my student home, and I don't have reliable
download counters for those, so I can't tell any download numbers. From ftp.mozilla.org numbers alone,
it seems to be the
most-used localization by far though.
The German localization of Mozilla gets included in all CDs of the big German magazine PC-WELT,
the German XPI pack is on the mozilla.org 1.6 CD (AFAIK), SUSE LINUX does include German packs for Mozilla,
and probably it's shipped in various other ways as well.
Two other contributors are shipping translated versions of Firefox and Thunderbird based on that work,
and the German Mozilla newsgroup de.comm.software.mozilla has been split into a hierarchy of 4 newsgroups
because one group couldn't handle the traffic of currently 4000 postings a month.
Recently, I've given an interview for a German SAP magazine, and an Austrian computer magazine asked
me for one as well. It's pretty astonishing...
On the other hand, I'm spending some hours a week answering mails telling users that I'm just a
translator, and I can't do support, pointing them to FAQs and newsgroups.
There are still other problems left in Mozilla itself that bug us L10n people...