Join KDE! Translate KDE!

It's that time of year again, KDE is nearing a new release day and it's time for translators to work on the making sure that new software/features are properly translated so that the thousands of KDE users can enjoy it in their native language.

Unfortunately translators come and go and KDE software continues to grow and grow, meaning that sometimes some languages fall below the line of what we consider an acceptable amount of translations for them to be shipped with the KDE releases.

For this 4.8 cycle this is the list of languages that was in 4.7 and if the release was today would not be released: Arabic, Bulgarian, Galician, Hebrew, Irish Gaelic, Indonesian, Japanese, Kannada, Latvian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Punjabi, Uyghur and Walloon

Obviously this does not mean that they will not released with KDE since each translation team has a different work schedule and some of them only work when really close to a release, but if you are a user enjoying KDE on one of the above languages you should think on volunteering to do some work so it stays that way. This is your opportunity to make a difference, write me to aacid@kde.org and join KDE by working on translations!

Help translating KDE

KDE has a strong translators community being one of the most translated software all around but as all areas of [Free] Software development the more people helping the better, so you should consider going to http://l10n.kde.org/teams-list.php and contact the team of your language. In case the point your team is marked as inactive or the contact for your team does not answer, you should contact the general list for KDE i18n where we'll give you further guidance.

"Why should i translate if i already understand english?" will you ask yourself. There is no definitive answer to that but i can give you two reasons:

• As any contribution to Free Software will make your karma go up and you'll be part of something BIG


• It will help you improve your english and your native language knowledge. That's because most of the times you understand english enough to understand the sentence, but transforming it to correct native language in a semantic and sintatic way is not always simple so you end up improving a lot both your English and your native language skills

As i said all languages need help, but the ones of this list are more in need as their former translators don't seem active anymore: Afrikaans, Albanian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bosnian, Breton, Chinese Hong Kong, Croatian, Dzongkha, Esperanto, Faroese, Igbo, Indonesian, Kabyle, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kirghiz, Kiswahili, Lao, Latin, Luxembourgish, Malagasy, Maltese, Maori, Mongolian, Nepali, Occitan, Pashto, Persian, Swati, Tamashek, Tatarish, Tibetan, Tigrinya, Urdu, Uzbek Venda, Vietnamese, Welsh, Xhosa, Yoruba, Zulu