When Peter and Myself decided to create Mozilla Europe back in 2003, we wanted to help the Mozilla project succeed in Europe. As Peter and I have been painfully aware, you just can't drop an American-centric product in Europe and expect it to be successful... You need the product to be adapted to the subtleties of the various sub-markets (we call this "localization", which goes further than just translation), but to achieve this, the product has to be ready to be localized from the start (we call this "internationalization"). You also need documentation and official Web presence, and of course local marketing and PR and last but not least, local communities (but that's a different story that I'll save for another blog post).
Two of the many people who have helped us adapt and spread Firefox in Europe happen to have written articles (in English) on this topic. Both are actually Mozilla Europe board members 
- Pascal Chevrel wrote Understanding localization traps. Pascal has been helping the Mozilla project for years now, and has recently decided to spend more time working on Mozilla.com localization. This is great news for the project if we can shape a better story for non-English-speaking users. For those of you who are interested in this topic, I strongly suggest that you subscribe to Pascal Chevrel's Blog's English feed (Pascal also blogs in French and Spanish);
- Zbigniew Gandalf Braniecki wrote about Flock Internationalization. Flock being based on Mozilla code, there are certainly things to learn from this document. A part of it is specifically interesting, namely A few facts about the World's language. These facts are interesting or scary, depending where you stand, like
4.9% of humanity speaks native English, 7.9% overall speaks English
. This "speaks" volume about our challenge to deliver a good user experience to the whole' world...
