Bits from Debian Installer i18n coordination
Hello and happy new year for all users of the gregorian calendar,
Please find in this mail a status of i18n of Debian Installer which,
in the last 3 years turned out to be the entry point for many
translators working on general Debian localization.
A summary of this can be viewed at
http://people.debian.org/~bubulle/d-i/i18n-doc/languages.html
Currently, we have a few sets of languages at various levels of
"support" in Debian Installer and thus directly supported on newly
installed Debian systems.
One must also mentions that languages supported in Debian Installer
are also supported in Ubuntu.
Languages with actual or near future support
--------------------------------------------
Supported in Debian "sarge"
---------------------------
The sarge installer officially supports 41 languages, including
English. Woody supported 16 languages (including Esperanto,
unfortunately no more supported in sarge):
Albanese, Arabic, Basque, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Catalan, Chinese
(Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch,
English, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian,
Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian
Bokmal, Norwegian Nynorsk, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese
(Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish,
Turkish, Ukrainian, Welsh
Supported in Debian "etch" installer beta1
------------------------------------------
The beta1 release of the Debian Installer for Etch featured 9 more
languages:
Belarusian, Esperanto (back), Estonian, Kurdish, Malagasy, Macedonian,
Tagalog, Vietnamese, Wolof, Xhosa
The supported languages count is thus 51.
Soon supported in Debian "etch" installer beta2
-----------------------------------------------
The upcoming release of the Debian Installer for Etch will
probably feature 2 more languages:
Icelandic, Kazakh
The supported languages count will then be 53 when we will release beta2.
Soon supported in Debian "etch" graphical installer alpha
---------------------------------------------------------
The graphical version of the Debian Installer hasn't reached a fully
releasable state. So, the next beta release will *not* officially
include the following 3 languages, but early alpha release of the graphical
version of the installer will support them:
Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi
============================================================
The whole count of languages which will for sure be supported in
Debian Etch is currently 56. This is estimated to cover 54% to 56% of
the world population, counting the number of speakers of these
languages with the data of www.ethnologue.com
============================================================
Languages with more long-term support
-------------------------------------
For these languages, we cannot guarantee yet that they will for sure
be supported in Debian Etch. However, for most of them, this is very
likely.
Prospective languages
---------------------
The following 2 languages have went through the "New Language Process",
which is a set of pre-requisites for a new language to be included in
the languages list. Their translators are actively working to release
a first set of translation and reach the 50% mark which will allow
them to enter the list of supported languages:
Gujarati, Khmer
New Language Process
--------------------
The following 6 languages are going through the New Language Process
described in http://people.debian.org/~bubulle/d-i/i18n-doc/ch03.html
Georgian, Kannada, Malayalam, Nepali, Sanskrit, Tamil
============================================================
The whole count of languages can actually bump up to 64.
This is estimated to cover 58% to 62% of
the world population
============================================================
Listed languages but contact lost or no activity
------------------------------------------------
The following 4 languages are listed among D-I languages but no activity
has happened for a while, or the contact has been lost with
translators:
Irish, Kabyle, Northern Sami, Serbian
What are we missing?
--------------------
Ranking languages by order of "importance" is somewhat tricky but
there are some languages that are worth be mentioned here, for which I
personnally really would like to see translators showing up, for
various reasons:
Thai, Malay, Urdu, Afrikaans, Zulu, Mongolian, Swahili (and, actually,
*any* African language), Punjabi (Shahmuki), Sinhala, Oriya, Marathi,
Telugu, Assamese, more generally ALL languages from India, Latin,
Quechua....all these ONLY being *examples*.
We all know that ALL translators are welcomed in the D-I world.
Again, very happy new year, full of unfuzzied strings, to all
translators and translation teams.
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