Call for Translation Volunteers
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The Apache OpenOffice project issues a Call for Translation Volunteers, to help us complete several translations that are nearly done, but need an extra push before we can release them.  Languages that are almost done include: Danish, Korean, Polish, Asturian, Uighur, Icelandic, Indonesian, Welsh, Catalan, Bulgarian, Latvian, Greek, Basque, English (South Africa), Portuguese, Swedish, Marathi, Kannada, Gujarati, Irish, Oriya and Turkish.  We welcome with native fluency in these languages.  Read on to learn more, or if you know you want to help this page has more information on how to get involved.

OpenOffice and Linguistic and Cultural Diversity
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OpenOffice is known for the many, many languages it supports, over 100.  This broad coverage included many languages that commercial vendors often ignore, including languages used by smaller populations, minority/regional languages, endangered languages, etc. For example, South Africa has 11 official languages. OpenOffice has been translated to all of them. By supporting languages that would not otherwise be supported we help reduce "digital exclusion" and promote development, local education and administration.

Apache OpenOffice Translations
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With the move from OpenOffice.org to Apache OpenOffice we have decided to ship only translations that are complete and which are supported by the community.  This helps raise the overall quality.  Currently we have full UI translations released for English, Arabic, Czech, German, Spanish, French, Galician, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Finnish, British English, Khmer, Slovak and Slovenian.

How you Can Help
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We would like to support as many languages as possible. If we are missing Apache OpenOffice in your native tongue, we need your help to change this. The project is open to support any new language as long as their is an active translation community behind it. OpenOffice is made by volunteers and we need more help in different areas. Localization is one key area here and it requires no programming skills. Everything you need is motivation to help and all other things can be learned from other volunteers who already help with translations.

We have a solid base for some languages where we already have more than 93% coverage of the translated user interface strings. That means it is not too much work needed to make Apache OpenOffice available in these languages. For some of the languages volunteers have already started or already finished the translation and they will be released soon. It's now up to you to help us to support more languages.

WE WANT YOU!

If you are interested, don't wait! Simply join our l10n mailing list by subscribing to the list, send us a note and you will get the help needed to get started.  More information is also on our How to Help Translate Apache OpenOffice page.  Join our community and be part of one of the biggest open source project on the world. You can help actively and you can make the difference!

The effort should be moderate and more volunteers can speed up the work on one language. For example making the translation for Danish complete took round about 30 hours starting by 97% UI coverage and here the missing pieces in the help files were translated as well. We plan to release further languages for AOO 3.4.1 and the next translation deadline is December 31th, 2012.

Arabic is already released but we are missing an active translation community for Arabic at the moment. This can be a problem for future AOO releases and if you speak Arabic and are interested please join us, your contribution and help would be very much appreciated.