One group in Ubuntu which never gets the credit they deserve are the translators. These fine people spend hours smoothing the road for Ubuntu into all the parts of the world. One project where this recently became clear to me again was the Packaging Guide.

Weighing in at 759 strings or 196K of text, and at times very technical text, it’s probably not the easiest document to translate. Still we have a very nice success story to share.

The Spanish team got their translations up to 95% completion. Incredible work! Muchas gracias! The other teams were busy as well, so we have:  Brazilian Portuguese (22%), Japanese (17%), Russian (9%), German (9%), Dutch (3%), along with other teams which are just getting started: Vietnamese, Macedonian, Swedish, Turkish, Indonesian, French, Latvian, Chinese (Traditional), Slovenian, Hungarian and Catalan.

This means that Spanish is the first language which made it past out magic threshold and will soon ship separate packages for the guide in Spanish. Fantástico!

I said “soon” because we are still working out a couple of kinks to do this in the easiest fashion. Thanks to help of many we figured out the following problems:

• #943154 Make Packaging Guide translatable
• #961936 Only ship translations which accomplish a certain level of completion
• #1067288 ./debian/scripts/add-languages produces empty packages
• #1067338 Introduce -common package for all HTML-based documentation

But we are still struggling with the following ones:

• #1043232 Japanese translation of Packaging Guide FTBFS
• #1068493 Spanish translation FTBFS

So if you are knowledgeable in this area, please consider helping out.

Thanks everyone for your stellar work on this. You make the lives of new contributors a lot lot easier!

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