8.1. How translations are handled within Debian

Handling translation of the texts contained in a package is still a manual task, and the process depends on the kind of text you want to see translated.

For program messages, the gettext infrastructure is used most of the time. Most of the time, the translation is handled upstream within projects like the Free Translation Project, the GNOME Translation Project or the KDE Localization project. The only centralized resources within Debian are the Central Debian translation statistics, where you can find some statistics about the translation files found in the actual packages, but no real infrastructure to ease the translation process.

Package descriptions have translations since many years and Maintainers don’t need to do anything special to support translated package descriptions; translators should use the Debian Description Translation Project (DDTP).

For debconf templates, maintainers should use the po-debconf package to ease the work of translators, who could use the DDTP to do their work (but the French and Brazilian teams don’t). Some statistics can be found both on the DDTP site (about what is actually translated), and on the Central Debian translation statistics site (about what is integrated in the packages).

For web pages, each l10n team has access to the relevant VCS, and the statistics are available from the Central Debian translation statistics site.

For general documentation about Debian, the process is more or less the same as for the web pages (the translators have access to the VCS), but there are no statistics pages.

For package-specific documentation (man pages, info documents, other formats), almost everything remains to be done.