This first blog post marks the opening of the internationalization blog! The i18n team will use it to share news and projects on the current plans. Don’t forget to subscribe!

The i18n team has seen some changes recently, at the beginning of 2026 and we thought it was necessary to publicly announce this change and introduce ourselves a bit.

Before all, we want to greet and deeply thank all internationalization coordinators that participated in the project so far and made GNOME what is is now. We are a global software community of volunteers, leading the free software ecosystem and are accessible in many languages. With this, we cover almost everyone on Earth. Thank you very much Andre, Alexandre, Claude, Daniel, Gábor, Gil, Mario, Piotr, Petr, Kjartan and all the others. Without you this wouldn’t have been possible.

What is internationalization?

Internationalization, or i18n for short, is the act of ensuring software or documentation can be used in other languages, countries, and cultures. This means designing and developing applications in a way that removes barriers to localization, making it possible to adapt them without requiring significant engineering changes.

In practice, this involves separating user-facing text from the source code, so it can be translated easily, and ensuring that the software correctly handles different character sets and writing systems, including right-to-left scripts. It also means being mindful of cultural conventions such as date and time formats, number formatting, currencies, and units of measurement.

Internationalization goes beyond text. It includes accommodating differences in sorting rules (collation), keyboard input methods, plural forms, and even layout considerations, as translated text can vary significantly in length. Developers must also ensure that their software supports Unicode and uses libraries or frameworks that simplify handling these variations.

For the GNOME community, internationalization is a collaborative effort between developers, designers, and translators. By preparing software properly, the i18n team enables localization contributors to focus on producing high-quality translations, ensuring that GNOME is accessible and welcoming to users all around the world.

A new team

The team has reborn with new faces: Anders Jonsson, Rafael Fontenelle and Guillaume Bernard, respectively coordinators of the Swedish, Brazilian Portuguese and French team. Let’s introduce ourselves a bit…

Rafael ( @rafaelff ) is coordinator of the GNOME Brazilian Portuguese Team for more than 13 years after a short but intense period of contribution as translator. Besides GNOME, he contributes to the translation of Python Docs, R language, Fedora, TranslationProject (GNU projects, etc.) and others. Also maintains some packages in Arch Linux’s AUR.

Anders ( @ajonsson ) is coordinator of the GNOME Swedish Team for over 10 years, translator in the Swedish branch of the Translation Project, and a member of the GIMP Team with a focus on internationalization questions and testing.

Guillaume ( @gbernard ) is coordinator of the GNOME French Team since this year after 14 years of contributions, first as a translator, reviewer and after a few years, he has been involved in submitting team’s translations. He is the maintainer of GNOME Damnes Lies , our translation platform since 2020. He took this responsibility after years of dedication from Claude. Thank you again for this mentorship!