Mozilla Firefox to Launch First Khmer Language Web Browser

Mozilla Firefox, one of the world's most widely used Internet browsers, will officially launch the first-ever Khmer language-browser by mid-March, allowing Cambodians to navigate the Internet using menu items in Khmer instead of English, a Mozilla representative said yesterday.

John O'Duinn, director of release engineering at Mozilla, said in an interview that he has been working from San Francisco with a small team of bilingual IT professionals in Cambodia for three years to "localize" the browser.

"Before this, anyone who wanted to surf the web had to be bilingual," Mr O'Duinn said, adding that the Firefox browser is already available in 93 languages on eight different operating systems. "But now, people can be online here and read what's happening in another part of the world."

The browser is 98 percent complete, with almost all of the 6,066 total strings--or commands such as print, view, download and help--translated into Khmer, Mr O'Duinn said.

The effort spawned from an experience Mr. O'Duinn had in Phnom Penh in 2006, when he saw several Buddhist monks in an Internet cafŽ trying to match a handwritten note in English to a menu tab on the browser they were using in an effort to figure out how to save a webpage.

"It was this moment of technology meets tradition meets religion, and I was so bothered by what I saw," he said. In 2009, he began collaborating with seven software developers at the Khmer OS Project--part of the Open Institute NGO that has since 2004 been translating and adapting free, open source applications like email and word programs to operate in Khmer--to bring the browser online.

"After all these years, now it's possible that Cambodians are using computers in their own language," said Javier Sola, Program Manager for the Open Institute, which has assisted the Ministry of Education, the police, and other government bodies train their staff on the software. "We want to continue the deployment of Khmer language tools to reduce costs and make these people independent from companies, eliminating barriers to technology."

Eng Vannak, 29, a webmaster at the Open Institute who has been working on adapting the browser to Cambodia, said the browser would potentially attracting more users online.

Although other web browser companies like Microsoft and Google have "localized" browsers in several languages, they prioritize money-making languages first, Mr. O'Duinn said, and are slower to work on translating browsers in languages that are not profitable.

"We've found a way to ship all our localized browsers at once, so even if we end up making no money [in Cambodia], we're OK with it," he said, adding that profits would come from Cambodians clicking on ads they see when searching with the Firefox browser, a revenue stream that brought the company about $120 million last year. "We just want people talking and sharing on a free and open web."

How successful the browser will turn out to be is uncertain due to the very few people in Cambodia hooked up to an Internet connection.

According to 2010 figures from the International Telecommunications Union, Cambodia only has about 70,000 regular Internet users. Still, Cambodia's web presence is growing fast, with data from Internet World Stats.com showing that Cambodia had 255,660 Facebook users in March 2011, up from a meager 13,380 users in August 2010.

Source: The Cambodia Daily
By Olesia Plokhii and Hul Reaksmey