During Akademy, I chatted with Aish about Malayalam, a language of Kerala state. It stands out for me as a language with a beautiful script.

Not two days after Akademy, I was approached by two people on IRC about adding a Malayalam translation for Calamares, the Linux installer. I think it was largely independent. In any case, Subin and Balasankar now run the Malayalam translation team on Transifex for Calamares. In ten days or so they’ve reached 50% translation state, which means that they land in the “ok” list of languages. The next release of Calamares will have Malayalam translations enabled and selectable from the language drop-down on startup.

Whether it looks good when used is another thing, though: for instance my FreeBSD machine didn’t display any characters (only boxes) while my Netrunner development VM did. Installing another 300MB of fonts gets me this 50%-state (I still think that’s gorgeous writing, and with the team working like they are, I expect that the front page will soon be all Malayalam):

Calamares Screenshot

Thanks to all the translator contributors in the team!