During the last two months, the Debian Catalan localisation team has seen two of their major milestones completed, after some tough work.

The group managed to release Sarge with a completely translated installer, but failed to provide a translation of the Install Manual, which was a regression for us, as it had been available in Woody. We didn't give up, and thanks to the stubborness of Miguel Gea and braindmg we slowly started translating the Sarge manual months after the release, so it could at least appear in the website.

But progress was too slow, so we planned an online meeting for the beginnings of the year to try to complete the translation doing a whole lot of translations during a weekend. Soon after we learned that joeyh, fjp and the d-i team wanted to terminate Sarge d-i manual support in svn RSN, as they would start to make changes to the docs to reflect etch changes, but fortunately Frans agreed to give us a slightly extended deadline, if we agreed to finish the job by January 14th:

20:37 < CIA-7> debian-installer: fjp d-i * r33721
               /sarge/installer/doc/manual/ca/: Add Catalan translation as
               translators would like to finish it for Sarge and have promised
               to do so 14 Januari 2006 at the latest

I really didn't think we would be able to make 100% in just 10 days, but the team, assisted by a large number of minions^Wnew contributors that volunteered on #debian-catalan, managed to do it I believe a few days before the deadline. Guillem announced it on our list.

Releasing etch with an up to date Catalan manual will be a lot easier, if we try to maintain it up to date as etch development carries on.

The second milestone was yesterday's completion of the Catalan translation for all five levels of the etch debian-installer, after a year of no translation activity on that front, and months of braindmg bugging me to do my chunk of work. Although it's now showing a shiny 100%, there's a lot of review work to do, and polishing it should be our focus for the next release.

I seem to have recovered some of my interest in translations. That's good, because GNOME 2.14 is around the corner, and it wouldn't be fair for Josep if he ends up doing all the job. :)

Also, I've been quietly working with a group of people at Softcatalà in a project that will probably have lots of press in our community. It's not public yet though, but I hope that it'll be announced in the next few weeks.