Back in 2007 I wrote an essay (in Macedonian) about the importance of having localized [free] software. I don't remember the details, but I think it is safe to say that in 2007 the Macedonian l10n community was at its best. We were localizing the leading free software projects, and we've been doing so for the past 5-6 years. That came to an abrupt stop a year later, in 2008, when a local company, an international foundation and the government made a deal to translate all the free software needed for the educational project the government carried out. The deal alienated almost every volunteer working on l10n in the free software community. The only surviving localization project is Mozilla Firefox on which I started working back in 2003 when then Firebird was version 0.7, and together with Damjan, we've worked on that for the past 10 years.

My attitude towards translating changed over the years. At the beginning it was fun work in which I learnt new things. After that was a mission to supply as much as free software in Macedonian as possible. The past couple of years have been no to let previous work go to waste. Something that needs to be done until someone else picks up the work. The past couple of weeks I worked on translating FirefoxOS. It seemed like a good idea when I started, but as I translated file by file, I realized that I don't enjoy in the work anymore. I guess making a major (albeit for a small market) contribution to the newest Mozilla project is a nice way to say goodbye to a decade of work.

I would like to use the time previously spent on localization to learn new things. I think that the work Mozilla is doing with Web Literacy Standard is very interesting, and maybe I can find a way to contribute to that in a not-l10n way. But maybe I will write about future plans later.

At the moment I don't know of anyone else doing any l10n work. Aslo, I don't think it is possible to restart that process in Free Software Macedonia. However, although no one is working, I think that there still is an association in the public that FSM is doing l10n work. Moreover, some of the people that used to work, still have a lot authority about these issues. I think that all these things are a big problem.

I still think that having localized software is very important. There are plenty of people that don't speak English. My parents use whatever leftovers of translation still remain in the current GNU/Linux distributions. On the other hand, as far as I know the only company that continuously provides Macedonian translation of some of it products is Microsoft. On the web, Gmail still doesn't have a Macedonian interface [and Facebook does]. Even without advocating free software, the obvious way to have many localized software packages in small language markets is by translating free software. Now I can just hope that few new people realize that.