Internationalization and localization Test Week this week!

After the highly successful Graphics Test Week last week (thanks to everyone who came out! A full recap will be posted soon), it's another Test Week this week: this time for internationalization and localization. This is a hugely important area (the majority of Fedora users pick something other than English with a US keyboard layout) which we don't always test very comprehensively, so I'd like to say a huge 'thanks!' to Rui He, Igor Soares, and Aman Alam for their hard work in putting together these events.

The first Test Day, running tomorrow (Tuesday 2011-03-01), will be on translation and internationalization support in Anaconda (the Fedora installer). We'll be trying to weed out all those cases where translations and localization (particularly keyboard layouts and fonts) cause issues in the installer that are not encountered when testing the default, boring, US English path. If you are familiar with a non-US English language to the point of being able to complete a Fedora installation using that language and the appropriate keyboard layout for it, please come along tomorrow and help with the testing! Instructions and images for testing are available from the Wiki page, and the team will be in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC all day to help out. If you don't know how to use IRC (it's a real-time chat system), just use WebIRC.

Then, on Thursday 2011-03-03, we'll have Desktop Internationalization Test Day, which focuses on testing the internationalization support in key desktop applications. One particularly important aspect of this event will be testing special input methods for languages which require them, such as Chinese and Japanese. Again, if you're sufficiently familiar with a non-English language to use Fedora and some applications in that language, please do come along and help with the testing! This time you'll be able to do much of the testing from a live image with no need to perform an installation.

Looking ahead, the following Tuesday, 2011-03-08, is Desktop Localization Test Day. This event will look at localization in desktop applications - in other words, mostly translations.

Once again, these areas are key to all Fedora users who don't use US English - so if that describes you, or you're just smart enough to be able to help out, please do come along and help with this important testing! Also, if you're able, it would be great to have this news spread in Fedora- and Linux-related news sites in non-English languages, so please do go ahead and translate this post into your native language (or write a better one!) and submit it to your favourite news site. It'd also be great to have all Fedora language- and country-specific mailing lists and IRC groups made aware of these events. We can't promise to have speakers of every language in the world on hand to help out with testing, but we'll do our best! It would also help if people could translate the Test Day pages and test cases into other languages. See this page for instructions on how to do this within the Fedora Wiki.