Sep 22nd

This is a new project to provide a central point of contact between programmers/project teams of free software, and translators/translation teams.

The Linux-Mandrake team is pleased to announce the http://www.linuxi18n.org/ project.

This is a new project to provide a central point of contact between programmers/project teams of free software, and translators/translation teams.

You may wonder why yet another project, there are already such projects for such and such language, or such and such program/desktop. But, while they are very important and surely fulfill correctly their tasks, the scope isn't the same.

This project aims to be a central point for all possible free programs; it could eventually serve as an intermediary to already constitued projects or translation teams; but it would also allow the participation of individuals, of little known free programs, etc.

Free softwares give, among other good things, the freedom to adapt a program to the needs and customs of any culture and language of the world; the tools to add the needed support for full translation to programs are there; as well as the willing of a lot of potential translators.

But very often, with the exception of 2 or 3 big projects, there is a lack of coordination, or a lack of knowledge on how to use those tools by the programmers, or the translators don't know how or when to send new updated versions of the localized texts, or some individuals want to participate but are stopped by the complexity to having to get a full CVS tree and compile the programs regularly, or a little free program isn't very known and some translation teams never heard of it and is never translated,... This project aims to address those problems, by creating a "translation bazaar", where the texts to translate can be proposed, people interested in doing the translation can pick them and send them back; by automatizing most of the work and taking the burden of coordination away of programmers and translators.

By my own experience and contact with various programmers and translators I can say that such a service is currently really needed; but only very big projects like KDE or Gnome can afford to have a similar service; and indeed it is seeing the KDE and Gnome pages that I had this idea, but this time open to all free projects and programs.

Join linuxi18n on http://www.linuxi18n.org

Contact: Pablo Saratxaga - Project Leader Email: pablo@mandrakesoft.com