Check how the translation of the IDE is coming together. So far, after just 4 days in the making, we have 18 full translations and yet another 7 in the making. This prototype of the IDE boots in your local language. There is no way to select the language from a menu or similar, it just recognizes your preferred language in your computer and it boots that way. The demo shows how I change the language in my computer and reboot Arduino in some of the languages the system has been translated to already.

This is possible thanks to a patch by Shigeru Kanemoto, who forked the IDE from GitHub and made a great contribution. One way you can collaborate is by adding a drop down list to the preferences dialog where users could use their preferred language, also a dialog window allowing you select your language the first time you boot the software could be nice.

Also, we are lacking quite many languages, so if you have some time to collaborate with this effort, please go to this page and follow the instructions on how to help out. Once this is done we will take over the reference pages that come with the IDE. In a couple of weeks we will be able of providing with the most important documentation to build your projects as a full download in your language, coming together with the IDE. But we cannot do this without you!

Do you want to see Arduino’s IDE translated to your own language? Do you have one hour to put into that? You can now help out by following the instructions to be found at this page in the playground. Any submissions before April 7th will be included in the next release of the software: Arduino 1.01.

So far we have: English, Japanese, and German seems to be on the way. Come and give us a hand any language … literally, any language is welcome: http://arduino.cc/playground/Main/LanguagesIDE