Internationalization/Localization

The KDE Project recognizes that the availability of KDE in a user's native language is of paramount importance in making a user feel comfortable and at home. The KDE Internationalization/Localization team (also called the I18N/l10N team) has taken on the task of translating KDE applications into many different languages. The Internationalization team consists currently of about 300 individuals who have translated KDE applications and KDE documentation into 88 languages.

Some of these languages are rarely supported by commercial software: Afrikaans, Catalan, Estonian, Esperanto, Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian and Slovenian.

All KDE applications support the "right-to-left" interface mode and KDE 3.2 will feature increased support for Indian languages (Devanagari, Bengali, Tamil, Syriac, Tibetan, Khmer).

On the technical side of the issue, it is important to note that the GNU gettext tools and KBabel are of central importance to the internationalization process. Also, in order to cope with varying string length, textual expressions and program dialogs must be geometry managed.