Three weeks have passed (was supposed to deliver some statistics last week but not that much had happened so I took the weekend to rest =)) since last report and we have had another huge progress in the code, most of it has happened the last week though.

As we approach the imminent release of GPicView the translators have been busy to complete the new strings and most of them have also completed and updated other parts of the project. It’s nice to see how interested the community are in completing the translation effort for their language. In early May we had four languages (and English) completed – Arabic, Spanish, Japanese and Swedish. I am pleased to be able to report that we have twelve (not including English!) individual language codes fully translated. We even got some new languages added these weeks that are completed. That’s a really fulfilling experience. Big up to Urudu (a sole maintainer does both Urdu and Urdu as spoken in Pakistan).
Another great achievement this last week was the progress from Dutch and Indonesian, Dutch was placed in the need work category (less than 50% completed) and are now completed. Indonesian wasn’t that far off but not in the runners up category (90% or more done).

Let’s get down to the figures for real then, the completed translations enable 1200 000 000 people to use LXDE in their native tounge. We have doubled the numbers in just about a month work! By completing the runners up category we will add another 411 200 000 native speakers. And by all you who get around by using a secondary language (English, Spanish, French?) the number of enabled users are truly amazing! The translators really deserv a big hand for their great work in connecting people.

I always try to get some languages to deliver, we have a sad category I call “Needs work“. These are not by any means minor languages but their progress is stalled and their completion rate is under 50%. We call members of the community who speak Afrikaans, Bulgarian (new language added just yesterday!), Galician, Korean, Norweigan Bokmål, Norgweigan Nynorsk, Farsi/Persian, Turkish or Vietnamese to the stands. If you show up and can complete the translation effort we could add another 275 000 000 people to the stash. Please note here that the Chinese translations (as spoken in China and as spoken in Taiwan) are not completed and would bring another 1 000 000 000+ people to the totals. We are a large community, but why stop at large when great is near?

If you know any of the not completed languages or want to translate LXDE in to a new language that we at this stage not try to support please contact us (via the mailinglist, the forums, me directly or by IRC, any means would probably do – e-mail is the best because of time zones=)).
If your language is already in LXDE in some state it is enabled in the Pootle server and it’s easy as reading the guide to get started. Or if you rather would like to get the files and use a PO-file editor there are guides for that approach. Help us become a well translated and enabled Desktop Environment.