[am-translate] And ask why a nation of 70 million Ethiopia did not do that!!!!

[TG]

Debian gives Linux a Bhutanese touch

Dahna McConnachie

22/06/2006 09:11:35

Bhutan, a country of 700,000 inhabitants that sits between China and
India, now has its own Debian-based operating system in the national
language, Dzongkha.

The system, launched earlier this month, was built by the local
Department of Information Technology and consists of a CD which can be
either installed or used as a live CD. The installation system uses
Morphix rather than the standard Debian Installer which was not ready
at the time of release

The CD includes a complete set of Dzongkha-localized applications,
namely the Gnome environment, the OpenOffice suite, the Mozilla Web
browser, the Evolution mail reader and GAIM as instant messaging
application.

Debian developer Christian Perrier was invited by the Bhutanese
government to give a keynote speech at the launch.

Perrier said it is important that users have computers that work in
their own language, and that free software leads the way over
proprietary software in allowing this to happen.

"They [the Bhutanese people] were very responsive to the idea that the
main challenge of free software is for countries to keep the knowledge
and develop it in their own country for the benefit of themselves and
their culture," he said.

"Getting more localization in a distribution brings the operating
system as close as possible to the user. In order to do this, you need
to translate all the material, from the installation system through to
the documentation."

Internationalization in Debian is a long-running story.

The Woody installer, which came out in 2002, supported 16 languages
and Sarge which came out in 2005 supported 42 languages. Etch, the
current version in development which is due out in December can be
installed in 63 languages.

Perrier heads up the effort to find translators for as many languages
as possible through the Debian-i18n mailing list.

"We are working hard on coming up with a strong framework for i18n
that will enable people to more easily customize Debian in their own
language," he said.

The "i18n framework" in Debian is currently a collection of small
pieces that are not always related.

"This is actually inherent of the very widely distributed nature of
the development of Debian, when compared to more monolithic projects
like KDE, or Gnome," Perrier said.

A project was started in May this year, in collaboration with
WordForge, to develop a framework to assist all i18n and l10n work in
Debian.

"This is a very ambitious project which could lead to something that
may seem similar to Ubuntu's Rosetta project. The main difference is
that it will be entirely based on free software and it will try to
establish some communication standards for interaction between l10n
projects," Perrier said.