Last week I pointed to the localization of the GF v3 Prelude Web Pages and now Ming Dong reports that the Release Candidate localized (ML) builds are now available. Go to the Java.Net Download Page and check the column labeled "ML" in the first table. Sun provides translations into French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Korean, but we encourage your participation if you want other translations - check out the Localization Site and the Contribution Page.

Ming is in charge of the localization efforts for the GlassFish Server and she is soliciting input on Expansion of Language Support. GlassFish is currently localized to Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, and Spanish - see TA entry and G11n Home Page. The process will be further simplified and opened for participation for GFv3 and GFv2.1.

If you are interested in helping, please contact Ming or post directly to the G11N mailing list at glassfish.dev.java.net.

Kohsuke posted the a new version of Hudson that includes the first cut support for internationalization and localization. In his blog, he explained the approach that is similar to used in Metro as well. Let us know if you are interested in creating localized bundles for Hudson. There are a few comments on the blog already showing the consistent community support around Hudson.

Find out more about how the project got started in a podcast that was released earlier.

The group working on globalization and localization for GlassFish have created a Home Wiki Page to coordinate their efforts. Your participation would be very welcome; check Ogino's Call to Participation, and the description of How To Contribute. There is also a (not yet very active) mailing list: g11n@GlassFish.dev.java.net. Languages currently being covered are: Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Chinese Simplified and Chinese Traditional. We would welcome help in adding content to these languages or in starting new ones; this is your opportunity to localize GlassFish or its documentation to your favorite language.

We live in a very diverse world and there is a lot of non-english content and non-english speaker developers, administrators and users. The localization requirements may vary depending on the target audience; for some it may be a hard requirement, for others could be useful, for some redundant. So, two questions...

On the developer side James has started an experiment in Community translation experiment for Java SE. I encourage you to consider contributing there and, should we do the same for Java EE? And, since I have your attention, one of the ideas with the GlassFish Wiki was to localize some (not all) of it. Do you think that will be useful? Want to volunteer? See my earlier blog.

BTW, I tried to get some good links about the use of non-english languages in the internet and I could not find a particulary good link. If you have one, please share it with us.