LXDE now accessible in local languages for 685 million people


As of yesterday the LXDE and PCManFM repositories are updated and all translations synchronized with there sources. It was a huge task to complete and lasted for almost 5 straight hours but here are the numbers!

LXDE is truly a international project with complete or started translations for most continents (Africa is laking but we are trying to fill that gap too!), as of now we have 35 languages in “official” support (including English). Of these 35 only three are 100% complet at the component level – big ups to Polish, Spanish (Castilian) and Swedish. Together with English these translations make LXDE accessible for about 685 million people (that’s a low count not including those who know and can use English as a second language).
In close range of reaching 100% complete we find Danish, French, Slovenian and Ukrainian at over 90% (adding 120 million speakers to the total).

Since the last update a month ago we have seen two new languages sky rocketing, Slovenian and Lithuanian, a huge effort by the Lithuanian translator and now only LXPanel is left out. For Slovenian we have a sole translator doing a huge work just the last week and I am confident it will be complete soon. At the Pootle server I have added PCManFM as a translateable component for the LXDE project, it is hooked with write access to the SVN server for that project The LXPanel Plugins have been added as a seperate “project” in Pootle too and hooked using the usual mechanisms to the SVN server for LXDE this to maximize the translatable content in the Pootle server.

Allowing translations via Transifex has been started and might be popping up during the spring for those wihing to use that platform instead, subscribe to the translation mailing list for more information about that or hang out at the IRC channel #lxde at irc.oftc.org. In the mean time use Pootle or download PO files from SVN/Pootle and submit to the tracker. One string translated is one string closer to the goal of being 100% translated. We really need some effort in some languages and I am really keen in adding new languages to the project if you are willing to give it a try.

I would like to see progress in the following languages (when they are complete we add another 430 million speakers!)
Russian
Korean
Vietnamese
Malayalam
Norweigan (both Bokmål and Nynorsk)
Dutch
Persian
Pashto/Pushto
Galician

For a quick start in translating LXDE components in Pootle read the illustrated crash course in the wiki.

With regards to the subject then, we are a highly translated DE and the numbers above shows that, the on going development of the LXDEcomponents have changed strings to the extent that while we had six languages completed a month ago we only have four left. And Indonesian and Slovak don’t even pass the 60% marker (mainly due to the addition of PCManFM but still, that’s one of the core pieces of software we have). We have decreased the overall degree of completeness but on the other hand progress have been made in many areas. Keep the good work up!