1.2. The importance of internationalisation and localisation

Debian's goal of providing a universal operating system is based on the voluntary work of many translation teams. Having a universal operating system does not only mean having all possible software tools available, it also means providing an operating system that can be used by anyone worldwide. Even though English is a very widely-used language in the IT world today, this does not mean that all the world population can speak it, or even understand it. As we have pointed out, in fact, the majority of the world's population cannot use English. That is why this goal is so important and why we need to fulfill it, at least partly, by providing an operating system accessible to every user, in a language they are familiar with, regardless of what that language is. The more languages we support, the more people we reach. It's as simple as that.

This means Debian needs to provide an installation system that can also be used by non-English speakers, and that can set up a system also suitable for use for non-English speakers. Debian users need to be able to read about the operating system itself, itself, so documentation must be translated, as well as application interfaces. Both the documentation available in the operating system itself, and the documentation available through other sources (e.g. the project's website). Debian users need to be able to ask for help, so mailing lists, IRC channels, fora and other interactive help systems need be available to them in a language they can use.

Making Debian usable by more people is also a selfish goal for the project: having more users means that the software developed by the project gets used more (more exposure leads to more testing and eventually, more features) and it also means that the new users might eventually contribute to the project (through bug reports, patches, translations) and even become Debian developers themselves. More access simply means more resources.