In the attempt to attract more people to the organized effort of translating a large number of Open Source applications from English to other languages, here’s a small HOWTO. Hope to be able to inspire more people to join in.

First, register (FREE) yourself here: LaunchPad, “a collection of services for projects in the open source universe. You can register your project, and then collaborate with the open source community on translations, bug tracking and code.”

Then, take a look at the available languages (I’ll be using the Brazilian Portuguese language since I speak it fluently): https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/breezy/+translations

Now (finally), choose a program that needs to be translated from the huge list. Being that you are not an official member of the $LANGUAGE Team, you can only make suggestions (by typing in your suggestion underneath the phrase in english and clicking the save button at the bottom of the page) for the time being. Someone from the team should then review it and approve it (or not). If you want to be part of the team, and therefore be able to apply your translations right away, contact the team leader by emailing him at the provided email address.

That’s all there is to it! Very simple, don’t you think?