Documentation I18n Beat

International Language Support

This section includes information on language support under Fedora.

• Localization (translation) of Fedora is coordinated by the Fedora Localization Project -- http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/L10N
• Internationalization of Fedora is maintained by the Fedora Internationalization Project -- http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/I18N

Language Coverage

Fedora features a variety of software that is translated in many languages. For a list of languages refer to the translation statistics for the Anaconda module, which is one of the core software applications in Fedora.

• http://translate.fedoraproject.org/languages
• http://translate.fedoraproject.org/module/anaconda

Language Support Installation

To install language packs and additional language support from the Languages group, run this command:

su -c 'yum groupinstall <language>-support'

In the command above, <language> is one of assamese, bengali, chinese, gujarati, hindi, japanese, kannada, korean, malayalam, marathi, oriya, punjabi, sinhala, tamil, telegu, thai, and so on.

Online Translation

Fedora uses the Transifex online tool to facilitate contributing translations of Fedora-hosted and other upstream projects by numerous translators.

Using the online web tool, translators can contribute directly to any registered upstream project through one translator-oriented web interface. Developers of projects with no existing translation community can easily reach out to Fedora's established community for translations. In turn, translators can reach out to numerous projects related to Fedora to easily contribute translations.

https://translate.fedoraproject.org/submit

Fonts

Fonts for most languages are installed by default on the desktop to give good default language coverage.

Default Language for Han Unification

When GTK-based applications are not running in a Chinese, Japanese, or Korean (CJK) locale, Chinese characters (that is, Chinese Hanzi, Japanese Kanji, or Korean Hanja) may render with a mixture of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean fonts depending on the text. This happens when Pango does not have sufficient context to know which language is being used, due to the Han unification in Unicode. The current default font configuration seems to prefer Chinese fonts. If you normally want to use Japanese or Korean say, you can tell Pango to use it by default by setting the PANGO_LANGUAGE environment variable. For example...

export PANGO_LANGUAGE=ja

...tells Pango rendering to assume Japanese text when it has no other indications.

Complete List of Changes

All fonts changes are listed on their dedicated page:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fonts_inclusion_history#F11

Fonts in Fedora
The Fonts SIG takes loving care of Fedora fonts. Please join this special interest group if you are interested in creating, improving, packaging, or just suggesting a font. Any help will be appreciated.

Input Methods

The yum group called input-methods (Input Methods) is installed by default providing standard input methods for many languages. This allows turning on the default input method system and immediately having the standard input methods for most languages available.

iBus

Fedora 11 includes iBus, a new input method system that has been developed to overcome some of the architectural limitations of SCIM.

http://code.google.com/p/ibus

It provides a number of input method engines and immodules:

• ibus-anthy (Japanese)
• ibus-chewing (Traditional Chinese)
• ibus-gtk (GTK+ immodule)
• ibus-hangul (Korean)
• ibus-m17n (Indic and many other languages)
• ibus-pinyin (Simplified Chinese)
• ibus-qt (Qt immodule)
• ibus-rawcode (Unicode Code)
• ibus-table (Chinese, etc.)
• ibus-sayura (Sinhala)

The first time iBus is run it is necessary to choose which input method engines are needed in the Preferences.

We encourage people upgrading from earlier releases to install iBus, turn it on with im-chooser, and test it for their language, and report any problems in Bugzilla.

im-chooser and imsettings

Input methods only start by default on desktops running in an Asian locale (specifically for the following locale: as, bn, gu, hi, ja, kn, ko, ml, mr, ne, or, pa, si, ta, te, th, ur, vi, zh). Use im-chooser via System > Preferences > Personal > Input Method to enable or disable input method usage on your desktop at any time with imsettings.

Under imsettings framework the GTK_IM_MODULE environment variable is no longer needed by default.

Indic Onscreen Keyboard

iok is an onscreen virtual keyboard for Indian languages, which allows input using Inscript keymap layouts and other 1:1 key mappings. For more information refer to the homepage:

https://fedorahosted.org/iok

Indic Collation Support

Fedora 11 includes sorting support for Indic languages. This support fixes listing and order of menus in these languages, representing them in sorted order and making it easy to find desired elements.

These languages are covered by this support:

• Gujarati
• Hindi
• Kannada
• Kashmiri
• Konkani
• Maithili
• Marathi
• Nepali
• Punjabi
• Sindhi
• Telugu
• Sinhala
• Malayalam