(also posted today on http://blogs.digium.com/2009/09/02/new- languages/ ) Asterisk is being used all over the world, in dozens or even hundreds of nations, in a huge variety of linguistic settings. Until now, the official Asterisk distribution has come in only three language ?flavors? ? English, French, and Spanish. We are long overdue for getting more languages into the ?main? Asterisk distribution, and over the past few weeks there has been quite a bit of work done getting licensing and practical concepts understood to the point where we are comfortable with expanding the number of available languages at the discretion of the community. There has been a document submitted for inclusion with Asterisk which outlines the protocol process, practical requirements, and license criteria for having a new language submitted to Asterisk as part of the official distribution. It should come as no surprise that we?re asking for all contributions to be in the Creative Commons v3.0 Share- Alike/Attribution licensing regime, as this is clearly the best (or only) method for distributing works such as audio recordings with an open-source package such as Asterisk. We?re also insisting that the talent that creates any language files be available for others to hire, so that there does not become a bottleneck with new prompts for others who wish to expand the range of recordings. Lastly among the important notes is that in the rare instances where we have new prompts as part of the ?core? package requirements, anyone who has submitted a language package is under a non-binding community commitment to get the new prompts created in their language for addition. (This is a rare event, so hopefully is not overly burdensome to contributors.) This is truly a community participation request ? there are far too many languages in the world for this to work without being almost entirely contributed by active Asterisk users and developers. The complexities of adding new languages is significant ? there are intricacies in the ?say.c? sections of code which determine how numbers and dates are pronounced. There are differences in the way voicemail prompts are created for playback. New languages may not be functionally complete if they require code to handle certain nuances of sentence structure, and the inclusion of new language audio files does not mean that they will be sensible in that particular language even if accepted. However, the first step is to get the language recordings in there, and then others can come in and correct the code once they have half the puzzle in their hands ? that?s the spirit of open-source! There are at least 35 language or dialect versions already existing in third-party repositories (http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+multi-language ) and of those there are probably a quarter that have more than one voicing in male or female talent formats. I?d love to see the majority of those find their way into Asterisk as selectable language options. If you know the person that has created one of these language sets, please forward them the new language guideline link below! I?ll be trying to contact all of the language contributors, but often there are linguistic barriers or dead-ends for contact data. To read the requirements and to get started on your language contribution to Asterisk, see this document which will soon be part of the Asterisk standard distribution: Asterisk Language Submisson Criteria, part of issue #15771. JT References: https://issues.asterisk.org/file_download.php?file_id=23667&type=bug https://issues.asterisk.org/view.php?id=15771 --- John Todd email:jtodd at digium.com Digium, Inc. | Asterisk Open Source Community Director 445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville AL 35806 - USA direct: +1-256-428-6083 http://www.digium.com/