This is dl10n, the Debian Localization Infrastructure.

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* WHY *
*******

No matter you call it Free Software, Open Source or whatever else, giving
access to softwares and their source code to everybody is a great idea. 
But the licensing is not the only restriction to the openness of software:
Non-translated free softwares are free only for the English speakers.

Quite a lot of people on the earth just don't speak enough English to use an
English speaking computer. And even if they could, non native speakers will
certainly prefer to use a computer speaking their mother tongue if possible.

The two main tasks to translate a computer program are (simplifying a bit)
first to prepare the program to be translated (called "internationalization"
or i18n), and then to actually translate it ("localization" or l10n).

The i18n asks to adapt the source code of the program, and may be very very
difficult. Once it's done, l10n is a rather simple task consisting in
translating some chunk of text in a specialized file.

The localization chalanges are thus not really technical. The first one comes
from the constant evolution of free softwares. The texts to translate are
endlessly modified and you have to detect those changes and let the
translators adapt their work accordingly.

Another difficulty comes from the diversity of actors involved in the
picture and their different goals and abilities. You first have the
developers, which are good in programation, but may or not care about
translation issues. Then, you have the translators, which are (hopefully)
good in their own language, but may not be fluent in english. Moreover,
their technical abilities can be limited. And finaly, the users may be bad
in technic and not speak english at all.

Some stats (only valid today, 27 mai 2004) to make clearer the size of the
translation teams, and the need of a specific infrastructure.

                           #languages    100%     >90%   >50% #strings
Debian installer               44         28       33     37    1160
Debian configurator (2d stage) 37          5       19     21     896
Debian core package (3d stage) 32          1       11     17    2190
Debian package scripts         51          0        0      3    7804

KDE 3.1                        75          5       17     40   44105
KDE 3.2                        77          7       20     37   61227
Koffice 1.3                    73          7       15     35    8679
KDE 3.1 documentation          75          1        3      8   28553 
KDE 3.2 documentation          77          2        2      9   36283

Gnome 2.6                      78         16       34     51   18025


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* WHAT *
********

Debian already have very strong infrastructures to handle things like 
package recompilation (dbuilder), package mirroring, distribution handling
(katie), bugs (debbugs), web page mirroring, etc. 

This package contains dl10n, the Debian localisation infrastructure. It is
composed of several programs:

dl10n-check: dig into the source packages looking for stuff to translate
-----------
 For now, it actually opens the source package and look for stuff to
  translate, and in the near future, a cooperative mode will be added,
  allowing the packager to specify this information in a 'debian/dl10n' file.
  
 Materials (=stuff to translate) are saved somewhere for later use by
  translators, and statistics are placed in a database because everybody
  loves neat graphics.

dl10n-spider: reads the translator mailing lists seeking for status update (STILL TO DO)
------------
 Most of the translator teams use a mailing list for coordination. Since the
  amount of exchanged mails can become rather big, several teams decided to
  normalize the title of their emails so that members can decide to read the
  mail or not from the title.
  
 The information indicated that way are the concerned program, the action of
  the mail author (intend to translate, translation to review, text sent to
  the packager), whether it is a program or documentation translation, etc.
  
 This system greatly improved member interactions, but one of the issues is
  that people get easily lost, and that you have to find a backup to make
  sure that no mail, no translation, no review gets lost on the way.
  
 dl10n-spider is this backup. It extracts statistics from the mailing list
  archives, easing the detection of such loss, or preventing any effort
  dupplication.

dl10n-txt: generate textual statistic views
dl10n-html: generates the debian web pages (STILL TO DO)
----------
 Everybody loves statistics. 
 Those two scripts should be merged into 'dl10n-stats'.

dl10n-bot: central coordination robot (STILL TO DO)
----------
 It would be possible to use a regular svn server there, but I prefer a
  specialized overlay. For example, it does not require to open an account
  on the host for each participant. 

dl10n-trans: translator interface (STILL TO DO)
------------
 Simple interface to the most common translator tasks: 
  request more material to translate, submit your work, ask for reviews,
  deal with reviews, check whether the translation you did so far are still
  uptodate, be informed if it's not the case anymore, report typo to
  developer, etc.
  
dl10n-devel: developer interface (STILL TO DO)
------------
 Simple interface to the most common developer (packager) tasks:
  declare what should be translated, retrieve the work of translators, 
  alert them before next release...

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* DEPENDENCIES *
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libwww-perl, and libnet-ldap-perl or libsoap-lite-perl are needed by the spider.

*******
* WHO *
*******

The main authors of dl10n are Martin Quinson and Denis Barbier.
dl10n-spider was made by Tim Dijkstra and Nicolas Bertolissio.
