Central Debian translation statistics

These pages show the number of packages in Debian that are ready to be translated, and how many are actually translated.

Be aware that this process is only a part of internationalization (which is abbreviated into i18n because there is 18 letters between the "i" and the "n") and localization (or l10n). i18n sets up the globalization framework, and l10n adds a specific "flesh" for each language and country into this framework. That's why the tasks to do for l10n depend on the achieved i18n. For example, if your i18n only allows you to change the text of a message, l10n merely means translating this text. If the i18n allows you to change the way the date is printed, you may express the way to do that in your part of the world. If the i18n allows you to change the character encoding, l10n is the act of setting the character encoding you need for a given language. Please note that character encoding support, including multibyte, doublewidth, combining, bi-direction, and so on, is a prerequisite for all other part of i18n and l10n, including translation, for some (mainly non-European) languages.

l10n and i18n are tied, but the difficulties related to each of them are very different. It's not really difficult to allow the program to change the text to display based on user settings, but it is very time consuming to actually translate the messages. On the other hand, setting the character encoding is trivial, but adapting the code to use several character encodings is a really hard problem.

Here you can browse some statistics about the l10n of Debian: