Perfect timing! i18n chat is coming to Linux! (Score 5, Informative)

Oh ho HO! International chat certainly is a problem in the Linux community, owing to many factors; not the least of which being that the developers of the major IM forces out there seem to largely be from ISO-8859-1 locales. Thus ISO-8859-1 works pretty well, and other, more ASCII-deviant (CJK) locales work with virtually no success.

The good news is that an answer is here! I've been on a crusade to make Gaim the penguin-pimpin'est international chat machine available, and it's really paying off! For the stable series of gaim (0.59.x, currently at 0.59.4 with 0.59.5 to be released possibly as I type this) (I just looked and 0.59.5 is out), if your locale is set correctly you should be able to chat in whatever language your little heart desires... (I have personally successfully used it with English and Japanese) as long as you aren't chatting over the AOL Instant Messenger service or the ICQ service, both of which use the Oscar protocol. However, MSN and Jabber, for instance, should be substantially correct.

The fabulous news is that the development version of gaim coming at us right now has first class i18n support on the whole gamut of protocols! With a timely move to Gtk+ 2.0 and the Pango text formatting system, Gaim now has international text formatting second to none in the OSS community and hardly rivalled in the commercial world. Images like this shot of gaim displaying Japanese, Russian, and English simultaneously display what I'm talking about very nicely. Not only can we do non-English text, thanks to UTF-8 we can do all of the modern languages of the world simultaneously. In addition, support for internationalization on the troublesome Oscar (AIM and ICQ) protocol has been added and is coming along very nicely.

In short, look for the next major release of gaim to clear up these issues in a big way. For those hardy souls wanting to test the code that's currently in CVS, please note that it is NOT currently complete, and isses that you have are most likely transient.

Also, please be aware that your locale MUST be set correctly for internationalized programs to work the way you expect. Programs that only deal with your system can be more forgiving, but programs that communicate over the network absolutely must know more about your locale, including your character set. If the output of your 'locale' command lists LC_CTYPE as, for instance, "C", it's no wonder i18n isn't working! Set your LANG or LC_CTYPE correctly for your language (en_US for English with ISO-8859-1, es_ES or es_MX for Spanish, pt_PT or pt_BR for Portuguese, ja_JP for Japanese, zh_CN for Chinese, etc.) and you might see general i18n support improving dramatically.