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Around the World in 80 Lines

December 10, 2003

This article was contributed by Ladislav Bodnar

One of the interesting aspects of the Linux revolution is the amount of volunteer work in all corners of the world providing support for dozens of languages. Some minority languages would never make enough commercial sense for proprietary software companies to support them, but there are no such lowly materialistic considerations for thousands of volunteer translators. Let's take a virtual journey around the world to see how this effort translates into real products benefiting those whose command of English is far from perfect. (Be warned that most links in the article lead to non-English language web sites.)

Starting in Europe, all Western European languages have been well supported for a long time. Germany and France have their own well-known distributions with global reach, while a lot of Spanish effort has been led by the government of Extremadura and its Debian-based LinEx distribution. Interestingly, the country's Catalan-speaking population has now its own distribution in Knoppix-based Biadix. Other Southern European efforts include Slackware-based Zeus Linux in Greece, Red Hat-based Caixa Magica in Portugal and also Red Hat-based Gelecek Linux in Turkey. Northern Europe's shining example of successful support for local languages is the Debian-based Skolelinux in Norway. Also worth mentioning is NordisKnoppix, which supports now 12 Northern European languages, including such minority ones as Faroese and Northern sami.

While English is fairly widely understood in most parts of Western Europe, this is not always the case in the emerging economies of Central and Eastern Europe. Luckily, we have seen much activity in that area in the last year or two, with independently developed UHU Linux in Hungary and Red Hat-based Aurox Linux in Poland being the best-known distributions from the region. But developers in other countries are catching up fast - there are now ongoing localization efforts in Bulgaria with Tilix Linux, in Slovenia with SLIX (both based on Knoppix) and Latvia with LIIS Linux (based on Skolelinux). Further in the east, the Russian Linux market has been largely dominated by ALT Linux and ASP Linux, both of which provide excellent support for the Cyrillic alphabet. Most of these projects also contribute their translations back to KDE, GNOME, OpenOffice, Mozilla and other large open source software projects.

Moving on to the Middle East, this is where things get slightly more complicated, with much of the region using one of the right-to-left writing systems of Hebrew, Arabic or Farsi. Possibly the best effort to-date in supporting Hebrew are GNU/Linux Kinneret, an excellent Knoppix-based live CD, and Boten GNU/Linux, based on Peanut Linux. Going further east we'll see a truly massive effort going into various Arabization projects, now mostly united under the Arabeyes umbrella. Arabeyes has contributed an impressive amount of work into KDE, GNOME and OpenOffice, developed support for Arabic console and created fonts, dictionary and spell-checking applications. A Knoppix-based distribution called Arabbix with near-complete Arabic support is another achievement. If any of these volunteer Linux projects is ever going to get a top award for the amount of contributed work, then Arabeyes has to be one of the top contenders! And while still in the Middle East, another project that deserves a mention is Shabdix, a Knoppix-based live CD with support for Farsi, by the increasingly active Iran Linux User Group. The product has not been publicly released, but if you understand Farsi, read this review or check out the included screenshots.

On to the Indian subcontinent and its multitude of languages and complex writing scripts. The central localization effort in the region is currently taking place at IndLinux, an ambitious effort to deliver Linux to all main language groups of Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Tamil and Telugu. Translating user interfaces and documentation is just one part of the work involved, with fonts and I/O modules equally important for the success of the project. Another regional effort is Ankur Bangla which has been working on support for Bengali, a language spoken in Bangladesh and parts of India. The GNOME-centric project has contributed a lot of work back to GNOME, as evidenced in these screenshots. Both IndLinux and Ankur Bangla have released experimental ISO images for download and testing.

In South East Asia, if we have to single out one country with most contributions to the success of Linux, it has to be Thailand. Efforts range from community projects such as OpenTLE with a Red Hat-based distribution called LinuxTLE and Thai-enabled OpenOffice called OfficeTLE, through Slackware-based Burapha Linux, developed by a Thai university to firewall and security products by Phayoune. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Other regional projects include a new Mandrake-based Vietnamese distribution named KDLC Linux and a couple of projects in the Philippines - Bayanihan Linux and Lorma Linux (both Red Hat-based).

East Asian languages are characterized by complex writing systems, a fact that has contributed to very hesitant deployments of Linux on desktops throughout the region. Just consider the issue of fonts for use by Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) languages, which ideally need to consist of several thousands of characters to be usable. Intelligent character input methods are essential for speed typing, yet the existing Linux implementations do not compare well with those available on commercial platforms. Even printing in CJK was not well supported until relatively recently. China seems to lead the effort in Linux adoption, but despite the country's name appearing frequently in the headlines, the reality is less rosy. Nevertheless, a good mixture of commercial and community distributions exists in the region; these include Red Flag, Cosix and Magic Linux in China, Thiz Linux in Hong Kong (with support for Cantonese), Linpus Linux (with focus on embedded Linux) in Taiwan and Hancom Linux in Korea (all Red Hat/Mandrake-based). Japan has a great variety of distributions ranging from well-known Turbolinux to Red Hat-based Vine Linux, Slackware-based Plamo Linux and Debian-based ARMA.

The rest of the world does not have to deal with font complexities, which makes life easier. In Latin America, Conectiva Linux is a well-established powerhouse on the South American continent, while the increasingly popular Kurumin Linux is an excellent community project, also from Brazil. Elsewhere in the region, there are interesting efforts in Mexico - a Red Hat-based distribution with Ximian Desktop called LGIS Linux and Peru - a new Knoppix-based distribution called Condorux. On the African continent, South Africa is leading the way with a substantial translation effort to provide full support for the country's 11 official languages, while Africa's first desktop Linux distribution, the GNOPPIX-based Impi Linux, promises to incorporate this work into future releases.

Even if most of us have no need to use any of the non-English Linux distributions mentioned above, it is still exciting to see all this selfless effort expended for the benefit of people, irrespective of their nationality, race, language or level of education. Is our bazaar-type development model superior to the old-style cathedral model? You bet! The internationalization and localization effort throughout the world is an excellent example of that.

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