GNOME is translated into many different languages. To see how well supported your language is, please look at the GNOME 1.2 Internationalization Status Report

The GNOME Translation Project (GTP) is working hard to support as many languages as well as possible. If you want to help to improve the current support of your language, please consider joining the GTP. The translators also translate GNOME user manuals and some developer docs.

Furthermore GNOME will support Unicode through Pango in future releases (GNOME 2.0 and later). See the Pango homepage for more information. There are also some screenshots available on the page demonstrating the power of Pango. With Unicode it will be also able to support languages like Arabic and Hebrew which is currently not possible.

The following list shows the supported (more than 75% of the po files translated), partially supported (more than 50% but less than 75%) and unsupported languages (less than 50%).

To enable support for your language, you need to add this to ~/.profile:

If bash (default in many distributions) is your shell:
export LANG=xx
export LANGUAGE=xx:yy:zz
For tcsh being your prefered shell use setenv instead of export.

Where xx is your preferred language as a code which can be found in front of the language, e.g. "da" for "Danish", yy and zz being other possible locales you may want.

Currently supported languages are:

• en_US: American English
• en_GB: British English
• da: Danish (Dansk)
• de: German (Deutsch)
• fr: French (Français)
• ja: Japanese (日本語)
• no: Norwegian (Norsk, Bokmål)
• ru: Russian (Русский)
• sv: Swedish (Svenska)
• uk: Ukranian (Укранська)

Currently partially supported languages are:

• ca: Catalan (Català)
• es: Spanish (Español)
• gl: Galician (Galego)
• hu: Hungarian (Magyar)
• it: Italian (Italiano)
• ko: Korean
• nl: Dutch (Nederlands)
• pl: Polish (Polski)
• pt_BR: Brazilian Portuguese

Currently unsupported langauges are (in the works):

• af: Afrikaans (Afrikaans)
• ar: Arabic
• az: Azerbaijani
• bg: Bulgarian (Български)
• cs: Czech (Cesky Yazyk)
• cy: Welsh (Cymraeg)
• el: Greek (Ελληϑικα)
• et: Estonian (Eesti)
• eu: Basque (Euskara)
• fa: Persian
• fi: Finnish (Suomea)
• ga: Irish (Gaeilge)
• he: Hebrew
• hr: Croatian (Hrvatska)
• id: Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia)
• is: Icelandic (Íslenska)
• lt: Lithuanian (Lietuviskai)
• mr: Marathi
• nn: Norwegian (Norsk, Nynorsk)
• pt: Portuguese (Português)
• ro: Romanian (Româna)
• sk: Slovak (Slovencina)
• sl: Slovenian (Slovenscina)
• sr: Serbian (Српска)
• te: Teluga
• th: Thai
• tr: Turkish (Türkçe)
• vi: Vietnamese (Tiêng Viêt)
• wa: Walloon (Walon)
• zh_CN: Simplified Chinese
• zh_TW: Traditional Chinese

The country codes are on www.linuxi18n.org/locales! There's also a more detailed description available how to set the country code correctly.

If you are a native speaker and you want to contribute to a partially supported or unsupported language don't hesitate to email the GNOME Translation Project (GTP). A list of team coordinators can be found here. Please look which package needs a revision, first. Then you might contact the coordinator.

This page will be available in many languages as soon as we have created the basics...so look out what's coming!

If you have any questions concerning the GNOME Translation Project write an email to gnome-i18n@gnome.org or to webmaster@gnome.org. Suggestions for improvements are also welcome at all times.