Everyone interested in participating to this effort should join the cooker-i18n@linux-mandrake.com mailling-list where will take place some discussions about localization in Linux-Mandrake.

Howto to subscribe?

Send SUB cooker-i18n in the subject of a message to sympa@linux-mandrake.com

The coordination of the internationalization effort in Linux-Mandrake will be done by Pablo Saratxaga <pablo@mandrakesoft.com>.

Currently Mandrake is the only, or has been the first main Linux distribution to have the most advanced internationalization support for/with those packages:

• man-pages-*: Mandrake has the largest collection of man pages in various languages: english of course, but also Czech (man-pages-cs), German (man-pages-de), Spanish (man-pages-es), French (man-pages-fr), Hungarian (man-pages-hu), Italian (man-pages-it), Japanese (man-pages-ja), Korean (man-pages-ko), Polish (man-pages-pl) and Russian (man-pages-ru). All those packages have been built with attention, compressed with bzip2 to save disk space (all man page viewers shipped with Mandrake have bzip2 and multi-language support), they include a special per-language makewhatis script and a cron entry to run it, allowing the whatis command to show you the info of localized pages too (depending on your LANGUAGE or LANG variables values). If you know of others please mail us so we can include them (BTW, we haven't the URL where to find korean man pages updates, do you know it ?)
• glibc: added the missing modules to /usr/lib/gcov; now iconv/gconv can also handle Armenian, Georgian, Vietnamese, and Laotian encodings, in addition to all the others already supported.
• iso-8859-14 support: that encoding is needed to properly support Cymraeg (Welsh) and maybe other celtic languages; update the same packages as for Lithuanian, with locales-cy 2.0-4mdk or superior instead of locales-lt.
• locales-*: The locales definitions for Linux; we provide the most complete set of locales of any Linux distribution. If your language isn't yet supported mail us, we are very interested in providing to each one the possibility to use Linux in his/her own language.
  Currently supported languages: ar, bg, br, ca, cs, cy, da, de, el, en, eo, es, et, eu, fi, fo, fr, ga, gl, he, hr, hu, hy, id, is, it, ja, ka, kl, ko, lo, lt, lv, nl, no, oc, pl, pt, ro, ru, sk, sl, sr, sv, th, tr, uk, vi, wa, zh
• mandrake_desk: the Mandrake specific icons in the KDE and Gnome desktops; those have their caption and tooltips translated in a wide array of languages too (de, es, et, ga, hr, hu, id, is, it, lt, nl, no, ro, ru, wa)
• xmms: The successor of the famous MP3 reader x11amp; MandrakeSoft has added full i18n support into the source code; that hasn't yet been included back into the mainstream xmms and therefore is a unique Mandrake feature :)
• Lithuanian support: We are pleased to be the very first distribution to support Lithuanian language (which needs iso-8859-13 encoding support); to enable it upgrade your XFree86, XFree86-libs and XFree86-xfs packages to version 3.3.5-mdk4 or higher. Upgrade freetype package to version 1.2-10mdk or superior, and package locales-lt to version 2.0-3mdk or superior.
  There are still some things to improve before the support is perfect (keyboard maps, a console font, check the Compose file for X11, and provide the needed gtkrc.lt files for Gnome/Gtk; it will be done soon)
• indexhtml-6.1: the welcome page showed by Netscape on a freshly installed Linux Mandrake; it has been translated to a lot of languages ( br, ca, cy, de, en, es, fr, ga, hu, id, is, lt, nl, no, pl, pt, ro, ru, tr, uk, wa). If your language isn't listed yet, mail us.
• XFree86-libs: with support for new locales for displaying texts in armenian, ukrainian, georgian, laotian, vietnamese, thai and a lot of languages using latin1 font encoding.
• XFree86-xfs: by integrating the powerful X-TT font server, wich adds support for True Type for all known font encodings. (if you know of a font encoding (that is really and widely used) wich is not included then write me !)
• ispell-italiano: Italian spell checker files.
• ispell-norsk: Norwegian spell schecker files.
• fortunes-mod:The i18n support here is double: the fortune sources have been changed to make it read the LANG variable and choose, if there exist, fortune texts in the user's language. That is a feature unique of Mandrake Linux. The other thing we do is to include in the package fortune data files in as many languages as possible (currently there are some in French, Gaeilge, Indonesian, Italian, Spanish and Walloon; if you have freely distributable fortune files in your language you can tell us)
• ispell-indonesian: Indonesian spell checker files.
• netscape-japanese-4.08: Japanese interface for Netscape 4.08 (includes localized nethelp)
• netscape-korean-4.08: Korean interface for Netscape 4.08 (includes localized nethelp)
• Spanish interface for Netscape 4.61 (includes localized nethelp)
• netscape-francais-4.08: French interface for Netscape 4.08 (not 100% complete yet; if you want to improve it you are welcome)
• netscape-walon-4.08: Walloon interface for Netscape 4.08 (not 100% complete yet; if you want to improve it you are welcome)
• netscape-castellano-4.08: Spanish interface for Netscape 4.08 (includes localized nethelp)
• acon: a package that brings arabic support in the linux console with it you can read/write in arabic on the linux console; the driver does RTL/LTR displayin, as well as the re-shaping of arabic letters in fonction fo their place in the word, and alef+lam ligatures.
• control-panel: that was easy, this little launcher has only two (2) strings to translate, the changes to the source were quite trivial :)   However, we are needing translation of the strings "File" and "Change Orientation" in as many languages as possible.
• gnomba: made the necessary changes to add the i18n support that is now integrated into mainstream package.
• gnome-core: the spanish translation of gnome-intro has been done by Fabito of the spanish team; and will be soon integrated into main Gnome sources
• All the packages are built including the latest *.po files (the ones with the translations of the user interface) that are available, taken from CVS or directly from the translators if possible; thus ensuring to have the more complete translation of the moment, even if it hasn't yet been included in the distributed tarball of the program sources. Also a CVS based system has been put in place to add summary and descriptions into the rpm packages for various languages.

 Britton team

• Jañ-Mai Drapier

 Bulgarian team

• Mariana Kokosharova
• Elena Radeva

 Croatian team

• Andy

 Cymraeg (Welsh) team

• Dafydd Tomos

 Czech team

• Student FEL

 Dutch team

• Jody Appermans <mandrake@brainster.org>
• Patrick Putteman
• Alex Vermulst

 Estonian team

• Riho Kurg

 French team

• David BAUDENS <baudens@mandrakesoft.com>
• Gregoire Colbert (gregus) <gregus@linux-mandrake.com>
• Pablo Saratxaga <pablo@mandrakesoft.com>

 Gaeilge (Irish Gaelic) team

• Seán (Sean) Kelley <s_oceallaigh @ yahoo.com.nospam>

 German team

• Stefan Siegel (Ag Haerder)

 Hungarian team

• Emese KOVACS
• Takacs Sandor
• Csaba Szigetvari

 Icelandic team

• Þórarinn (Tony) R. Einarsson
• Jóhann Þorvarðarson (Johan Thorvardarson)

 Indonesian team

• Andy <chandy@indo.net.id>
• Mohammad DAMT <mdamt@cakraweb.com>
• Muhamad Faizal <faizal@cdl2000.or.id>
• kelana <nk@telkom.net>

 Italian team

• Giuseppe Ghibo' <ghibo@linux-mandrake.com>
• Arch. Filippo Grosso
• Paolo Lorenzin

 Korean team

• Soo-Jin Lee

 Lithuanian team

• Zilvinas Atkociunas
• Kestutis Kruzikas
• Mykolas Norvaisas

 Macedonian team

• Ognen Duzlevski

 Norwegian team

• Terje Bjerkelia <terje@bjerkelia.com>

 Polish team

• Paweł Jabłoński (Pawel Jablonski) <pj @ linux-mandrake.com>

 Portuguese team

• Andrei Bosco Bezerra Torres
• Gustavo Viola

 Romanian team

• Florin Grad <florin@mandrakesoft.com>
• Alexandru Hartmann

 Russian team

• Алексей Новодворский ( Aleksey Novodvorsky ) <aen@linux-mandrake.com>
• Алексей Смирнов (Aleksey Smirnov) <smi@logic.ru>

 Serbian team

• Ognen Duzlevski

 Slovakian team

• Peter Kral

 Spanish team

• Sergio Korlowsky <xe2xpk@nld.bravo.net>
• Fabian (Fabito) Mandelbaum
• Pablo Saratxaga <pablo@mandrakesoft.com>
• Mario Yepes

 Turkish team

• Hakan Terzioğlu (Hakan Terzioglu) <hakan@gelecek.com.tr>
• R. Tolga Korkunçkaya (Tolga Korkunckaya)
• Onur Yazıcı (Onur Yazici)

 Ukrainian team

• Dmytro Kovalov

 Walloon team

• Lorint Hendschel <LorintHendschel@skynet.be>
• Pablo Saratxaga <pablo@mandrakesoft.com>

You can read a good explanation about localization, its meaning, its implications, and some vocabulary, from Mozilla i18n & l10n Guidelines page and the comprehensive Concepts of C/UNIX Internationalization page of Dave Johnson.

And you can visit this very interesting and complete site on charsets encodings: http://czyborra.com/charsets/

The excellent i18n HOWTO of KDE explains the steps to translate a *.po file.

There is also my page about Linux locales, which has links to several language specifics translation teams and info. And the (still at its begining) Linux i18n project web site.

There are also some projects of coordination between transaltors and programers that exist for some big projects, like for Gnome, or for KDE, and the mailing lists at li.org.