I18n - status, plans, jobs?

[Milan Zamazal]

Hi,

we have formed a group of people in Czech Republic and Slovakia
interested in Debian internationalization (two Debian maintainers and
several non-maintainers).  Lack of national support is a big problem of
free operating systems in our countries and we would like to help
removing this drawback in Debian.

We had some discussion about short term and long term topics.  Of
course, we would firstly like to know what i18n support is available
right know and what i18n plans already exist.  AFAIK, there is a support
mostly for translating messages (boot floppies, dselect) and possibly
some language selection at boot time.  This could be a little more
complicated for us than for people in Western Europe, because our
languages belong to ISO Latin 2 encoding, which raises some problems not
known for Latin 1 languages (fonts, etc.).  (We feel that proper
environment setup is currently more important for Czech/Slovak speaking
Debian users than translations.)

Could someone point me to existing Debian i18n projects please?  What
can we do for our languages already before Debian 2.0?  What projects
can we help?  What future i18n plans exist?  Are they some people
especially from Latin 2 countries around Debian i18n?  Our resources are
not much big, but we feel i18n being very important topic and want to do
as much as possible in this area.

Thanks,

Milan Zamazal