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LibreOffice Native Language Projects – TDF Annual Report 2025

2026-05-26

LibreOffice is available in over 120 languages, thanks to the work of localisation communities around the world. We asked them to summarise their work in 2025 – here’s what they had to say…

Czech

The Czech community maintained an active presence both online and in-person. Their localisation efforts remained strong, keeping the UI fully translated and the Help files at 95% completion. The team also stayed connected with their user base through the Czech Ask LibreOffice site along, with social media presence across X, Facebook, Instagram and Mastodon.

There was also outreach at events. The team hosted dedicated LibreOffice booths at InstallFest in April and LinuxDays in October, both held in Prague. Documentation also saw significant updates, with the publication of the Getting Started Guide (24.8), the Calc Guide (25.2), and the Draw Guide (25.8).

Danish

The Danish community focused on multimedia education and consistent localisation in 2025. There was the launch of the @libreofficeskolen (“LibreOffice School”) YouTube channel. This initiative provides the Danish-speaking public with a series of instructional videos designed to lower the barrier to entry for new users. Alongside this output, the community kept the UI and Help files fully translated at 100%, and ensured that LibreOffice promotional videos were accessible via localised subtitles.

Dutch

Beyond maintaining the local website and providing assistance via the Ask LibreOffice website and mailing lists, the Dutch-speaking community worked on many documentation updates.

Beginning in January with the Calc Guide for 24.8, the community then published a steady stream of translated manuals for version 25.2, including the Writer, Impress, Math, and Getting Started Guides. This effort then lead to the release of the updated 25.2 Calc Guide in July. On the localisation front, the Dutch team continued their work on Weblate, successfully maintaining 100% translation coverage for both the User Interface (UI) and the Help system, following upstream changes.

Finnish

The Finnish community focused on steady and ongoing translation efforts. The team prioritised localisation of the UI, with secondary work continuing on the Help system. To ensure the long-term sustainability of these efforts, the community has been proactive in outreach, utilising the vapaaehtoistyo.fi online platform to recruit new volunteers.

French

On the technical front, the French-speaking team maintained 100% translation coverage for both the UI and Help systems across all versions of LibreOffice. Their localisation work extended to the new Hugo-based website, release notes, and the Extensions wiki page. Significant progress was also made on the translation of Calc functions on the wiki and the subtitling of promotional videos.

Outreach was a major topic in 2025, with the community representing LibreOffice at events like Capitole du Libre in Toulouse, and Open Source Experience in Paris. The team also worked on academic ties, coordinating with UBO University to involve translation students in user guide writing. Beyond documentation and QA, the French team supported users through the Ask LibreOffice site and published various articles on LinuxFR. In addition, there were REGEX tutorials for civil servants and introductory presentations at public media libraries.

German

Throughout the year, the German-speaking community wrote blog posts (and translated others from the English-language blog), maintained its social media activity on Mastodon, and worked on user interface translations. Community members also attended local events on behalf of the LibreOffice project, such as the Augsburger Linux-Infotag 2025 and Digitaltag 2025 in Duisburg.

Irish

The Irish-speaking community made significant steps in 2025 to bring the suite to native speakers. Currently, the UI and website translations are nearing 100%, with the LibreOffice 26.2 user interface already reaching a 96% completion rate. The team’s primary focus is now on finalising these remaining strings and resolving technical checks.

Italian

The Italian-speaking community maintained 100% translation status for the UI and Help files across all active versions of the suite. The team helped with localising the project’s new Hugo-based website and kept the Italian-speaking public informed by translating all release notes and press releases. Current efforts are focused on the ongoing translation of Calc functions on the wiki and a comprehensive revision of various wiki pages.

In 2025, the Associazione LibreItalia organised a full-day LibreItalia conference in Gradisca d’Isonzo, following the adoption of a regional law mandating the use of free open source software in Friuli Venezia Giulia, an eastern Italian region bordering Slovenia. The politician who signed the law provided an overview of the approval process.

The event was organised by Marco Marega, a long-standing member of LibreItalia who is active in the localisation team and other areas of the project. Several members of the Pordenone LUG attended the conference and initiated a discussion about organising the 2026 LibreOffice Conference in their city. This discussion then evolved into an official proposal.

Japanese

The Japanese community had a busy year in terms of events. There was the LibreOffice Asia Conference 2025 in Tokyo, a two-day event that brought together 70 attendees. Outreach extended internationally as Japanese members traveled to COSCUP 2025 in Taiwan to deliver three talks and strengthen ties with the Taiwanese community.

The community also organised:

Online Hackfests: Held 46 times via Jitsi and YouTube Live
Online Study Parties: Three sessions dedicated to user knowledge sharing
LibreOffice Days: Monthly offline meetups in Osaka, co-hosted with the Open Data Mokumoku-kai
Open Source Conferences (OSC): Booths and hackfests at seven locations across Japan, from Hokkaido to Fukuoka

On the documentation front, the team published the Writer Guide for LibreOffice 25.2 in Japanese. Localisation efforts currently stand at 91% for the UI and 46% for Help. The team also remained responsive to end users, answering nearly 50 new questions on Ask LibreOffice, publishing 20 blog articles, and maintaining a steady presence on X, Facebook and Bluesky.

Kazakh

Starting in late 2025, the community launched a refresh of its translation efforts, achieving 100% UI completeness in time for the LibreOffice 26.2 release. This work extended to the localisation of the official website and the activation of the Help master branch, preparing for future documentation projects.

To improve consistency across other open source projects, the team is currently developing a unified Kazakh glossary derived from various localisation projects. Furthermore, the community has begun testing the use of AI-assisted translations, reporting high-quality results to improve their workflows in 2026.

Tagalog

The Tagalog community made steps forward in localisation, maintaining the user interface and Help files at a high completion rate of 98–99% across all versions. The team continued to integrate Deep Language Modeling to automate accuracy verification. While the community experiences a natural ebb and flow of contributors, there is growing interest in expanding support to regional dialects, such as Ilocano.

The team also wishes to extend a special note of gratitude to the dedicated group of US-based translation helpers whose contributions were vital to success in 2025.

TDF says: many thanks to all native-language projects for their work in 2025! Of course, this is just a selection of their activities, based on communities that reported their activities, but there are many more too.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or make a donation. Thank you!

LibreOffice at the Augsburger Linux-Infotag 2026

2026-05-06

Most of the work in the LibreOffice project takes place online – in our Git repository, on mailing lists, on IRC and other places. But where possible, we like to meet in-person as well, at events around the world! Last weekend, for instance, we were at the Augsburger Linux-Infotag in southern Germany.

As the name suggests, this event is all about Linux and free and open source software (FOSS). The LibreOffice community was present with a stand, and we had a laptop to demonstrate the software, along with merchandise: flyers giving reasons to use LibreOffice; flyers explaining what The Document Foundation does; stickers; and beer/coffee mats.

Most of the visitors to our stand were already familiar with LibreOffice – as is expected at such an event. But visitors also had lots of questions, like:

Where is LibreOffice being widely used now?
How can I customise the user interface?
Where can I report a bug?

We also talked to several people helping to roll out LibreOffice in companies and local administrations, so we hope to have more news about those migrations soon. Thanks to everyone who stopped by, and our next planned event in Germany is FrOSCon, so see you there!

Thank you, on behalf of ODF

2026-05-052026-05-05

Recently, The Document Foundation published an open letter to European citizens. We asked Euro-Office – the new coalition forming around a European alternative for productivity – whether ODF (the Open Document Format) would be its native document format.

Unfortunately, we have not yet received a reply, and this confirms – at least in part – the suspicion that Euro-Office will join Microsoft’s allies in a strategy to lock in European citizens, who will see their content snatched away by a company that – in words only – presents itself as a defender of digital sovereignty.

With the open letter, we have raised an issue that the general debate is not yet grasping: digital sovereignty is not determined solely by the terms of the licence and the location of the server, but by the format in which documents are created, stored and exchanged.

We were able to pose our question publicly, with confidence, because we represent something extremely solid – support for the single open and standard format: ODF – which has been built up over twenty years by many people, whose names rarely appear in press releases.

The foundations underpinning the political moment

Germany has established by law that ODF is the mandatory format for public administration, whilst the Interoperable Europe Act has made open standards a legal obligation across all EU Member States. Consequently, policymakers in Berlin and Brussels are now championing arguments that once circulated only on technical mailing lists and in standardisation committee rooms.

None of this came out of nowhere.

Before there were mandates, there were organisations funding the development of ODF when no politician and no law required it. Here, The Document Foundation has always been at the forefront, alongside various companies in its ecosystem.

Before there were legislative victories, there were the members of the OASIS ODF Technical Committee, who maintained, defended and evolved the specification against all odds: hostile standardisation battles, years of institutional indifference, and a market that had decided – in deference to monopolistic positions – that the matter had already been settled in favour of the proprietary OOXML format.

Before there were announcements of coalitions and summits on sovereignty, there were users who chose ODF and continued to choose it, year after year, accepting the challenge of the incompatibility scientifically imposed by OOXML as a price worth paying to retain control and ownership of their own content.

This is the foundation upon which every recent political achievement rests.

The legislation cites a standard that exists and is maintained. The arguments on interoperability point to a format that works, is implementable and has a community behind it. The questions we are now able to ask publicly – of institutions, coalitions and the ecosystem – are possible because the answer to the question “does open document interoperability work?” has been provided by all those people who did not wait for institutions to wake up after years of hibernation to prove it.

The funders of the ODF format

Developing and maintaining an international standard is not a free labour of love. It requires legal infrastructure, technical expertise, constant organisational commitment and the patience to operate on timescales that no quarterly reporting cycle would recognise as rational.

The organisations that funded the development of ODF – The Document Foundation and its predecessors and partners – have made a long-term commitment to the principle that the infrastructure of written communication must not be the proprietary asset of a single supplier. A commitment that is now being confirmed at a legislative level, the credit for which goes – largely – to all those who made it before it was available.

The OASIS ODF Technical Committee

Standards do not maintain themselves. Behind every version of the ODF specification – from the initial 1.0 to the current 1.4 – there are people who have dedicated their time and professional expertise to a slow process largely invisible to all those who ultimately benefit from its results.

The OASIS ODF Technical Committee worked both during the controversies over ISO standardisation – the period when the approval of OOXML threatened to render the entire ODF effort politically irrelevant – and during the long years when market share data offered little encouragement.

Despite this, it produced a technically coherent specification that is genuinely implementable and designed – unlike its rival – with interoperability as a fundamental principle rather than an afterthought.

Today, when a politician identifies ODF as the standard to be adopted by their administration, they are honouring the results of that work, which deserves to be mentioned and recognised in all its importance.

The users who chose ODF

All the people who saved in ODF format when it would have been easier and more convenient to use OOXML.

All the people who explained to colleagues, clients, and procurement officers why document format is a fundamental issue.

All the people who put up with the problems – requests for files in “Word” format and questions about compatibility – but still chose the harder but more consistent path.

All these users have kept ODF alive as a living format, not just as a specification. They have generated interoperability experiences, reported bugs and provided real-world usage data. They have demonstrated that ODF is not just a theoretical commitment but a practical daily reality for hundreds of thousands of people in every sector and every country.

All these users were, in the strictest sense of the term, ahead of their time. They were already implementing the policy that Germany has just legislated. They were practising the interoperability that the EU is now making mandatory.

And they arrived at this through personal conviction rather than institutional duty, and then held their ground for twenty years, whilst the institutions caught up with a culpable delay.

Thank you

To the funders, the members of the technical committee and the users: what is happening today at a political level is a belated public recognition of the work you have carried out in silence, without fanfare and without thanks, and silently enduring the comments of those who did not understand, or perhaps did not want to understand.

You are no longer a niche group. You are the vanguard that has proven the validity of a concept, and that has made it possible for those politicians who realised that your example was the one to follow – and not that of the lock-in loyalists – to make their case.

Today, The Document Foundation can stand before the European institutions, coalitions and the wider ecosystem, and ask difficult questions about the sovereignty of formats because you have built the foundations upon which we stand. The rest of the world is catching up to a position that you have held for twenty years.

All of this deserves recognition. Thank you.

LibreOffice project and community recap: April 2026

2026-05-04

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more…

We started April by announcing the LibreOffice Writer Guide 26.2. This is an extensive handbook full of tutorials, tips and tricks for the software. A huge thanks to everyone who helped to work on it!

Next, we posted the LibreOffice State of the Project, April 2025 – March 2026, based on data extracted from the LibreOffice dashboard and the Matomo repository.

There was another update from the documentation team: a facelift for the LibreOffice Bookshelf.

Then we reported back from the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage, where the German-speaking LibreOffice community was present with a stand and merchandise.

In other event news, the Indian LibreOffice community took part in Document Freedom Day 2026 in Noida. They even had a cake 😊

And there’s more: we attended the Grazer Linuxtage and gave a talk about what LibreOffice is, where it’s going, and how anyone can get involved to improve it.

We have a new developer in The Document Foundation team! Vissarion Fisikopoulos joins us to work initially on LibreOffice Base and databases more broadly, with a focus on Base itself and the ways database functionality connects with the rest of the suite.

Jiajun Xu wrote two articles looking back at the LibreOffice Asia Conf 2025, specifically the Panel: Lessons from Open Source Business – part 1 and part 2.

LibreOffice is available in over 120 languages, but we need help maintaining the translations (and adding more). We reached out for Swahili speakers – and have already heard from volunteers, so a big thank you to them! 😊 Of course, everyone is welcome to localise LibreOffice in languages that they know…

At the end of March, the InstallFest 2026 conference took place in Prague, and members of the Czech-speaking LibreOffice community were there. In April, they published their report from the event.

And finally, we wrapped up the month with the release of LibreOffice 26.2.3. This is the third bugfix release in our latest stable branch.

Like what we do? Support LibreOffice with a donation – or join our community and help to make LibreOffice even better! Also keep in touch – follow us on Mastodon, Bluesky, Reddit and Facebook.

Insights from the InstallFest 2026 Conference in Prague

2026-04-29

Petr Valach from the Czech LibreOffice community writes:

On the last weekend of March 2026, the regular InstallFest 2026 conference took place. Here is a summary of the news and insights we gained at the event.

New venue

What every visitor noticed immediately upon entering was the change in the location of the conference spaces. Instead of Building E in the courtyard of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering complex, visitors headed up the stairs directly inside Building A from the reception. The conference thus gained larger premises (three floors were allocated), which visitors likely appreciated, as there was no crowding anywhere.

As I mentioned in my report from the previous year, I personally prefer historic spaces over modern architecture like that of LinuxDays. Its design is also very interesting, with a certain intended rawness and practicality, but historic buildings hide their own charm and the mystery of bygone times.

However, the placement of most booths was problematic. They were (as last year) located in a single room. If visitors didn’t know about them, they wouldn’t go there on their own – they had to deliberately search and find them (although there were signs everywhere and the magnetic navigation system deserves praise). Booths should rather be placed in hallways where they are visible. On the other hand, it must be acknowledged that due to echo, such placement would increase noise levels in the corridors, which could be disturbing. In any case, there were very few visitors at the LibreOffice booth – much fewer than at LinuxDays. Therefore, the list of observations will be brief.

At the The Document Foundation / LibreOffice booth

At the booth, in addition to providing information and advice, we offered traditional promotional items such as stickers, beer coasters, and flyers. New this time were badges that visitors could pin to their lapels, and interest in them was surprisingly high.
A small contest in the form of a fill-in puzzle was again prepared for visitors. Clues were distributed across two floors where the conference took place.

This year, only one member of The Document Foundation attended InstallFest. A significant reinforcement, however, was thirteen-year-old Matěj, who helped mainly with carrying things and staffing the booth. He also attended a lecture focused on FreeCAD and its related workshop (plus one more). Matthew is a high-functioning autistic with interests in physics, astronomy, photography, and IT, and he will newly contribute to LibreOffice translations. We’ll see how he does.

Topics and insights

Just a few days before the conference, the German government issued a directive mandating the use of the ODF format in public administrations. ODF is one of the required formats (alongside XML, PDF, etc.). The OOXML format is entirely absent, meaning it is not supported at the federal level in Germany. This has clear consequences and signals a move away not only from OOXML but also from Microsoft Office, as its compatibility with ODF is not good.

This information (along with recent implementations, for example in Denmark, Austria, Schleswig-Holstein, etc.) generated significant interest among visitors. These implementations demonstrate that governments (regional or national) take LibreOffice seriously. They send a signal that LibreOffice is a high-quality suite capable of meeting governmental needs.

For this to be the case, LibreOffice must meet certain criteria. Perhaps the most important is functionality – it must be able to do what governments require. Equally important, however, is security. As we know, using Microsoft 365 (the cloud version of Microsoft Office) is problematic because it conflicts with GDPR regulations. Users do not have control over their data when using this application. This issue does not arise when using the desktop or online version of LibreOffice; here, users have full control over their data. For institutions that process sensitive personal data, this is a crucial requirement that cannot be taken lightly.

It was interesting to observe how important privacy and security are to booth visitors (mostly young students). But not only to them. One student from the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University mentioned that using Google Workspace is prohibited at their school due to data protection concerns; however, it is curious that Microsoft 365 is still allowed (even though the same policy issues apply).

The students we spoke with are generally satisfied with LibreOffice and use it for standard office tasks. In addition to Writer and Calc, Impress is also used – students are satisfied with it, although it is often considered the weakest module of LibreOffice. They agreed that it would be very useful to directly label objects on slides automatically, which would improve clarity when editing animations; users would immediately see the order of actions applied to specific objects (as in PowerPoint).

One student also asked about morphing between slides (as in PowerPoint); Impress does not support this feature, and subjectively it is not essential – more of an unnecessary “visual effect.”

This time, far fewer people participated in the contest than at LinuxDays – only seven completed entries were submitted, which is even fewer than last year at InstallFest. Nevertheless, three successful participants were drawn and won T-shirts and a printed color translation of the Writer manual. As always, participants could add questions or comments – only one participant did so, with two questions:

The first concerned dark mode support. This is not new in LibreOffice; it can be selected under Tools | Options in the LibreOffice | Appearance section. Since LibreOffice 25.8, users can not only switch between light and dark themes but also install themes that completely change the interface colors.
The second question was about support for cloud services in LibreOffice. LibreOffice allows connections to various cloud services such as OneDrive, Google Drive, WebDAV, and others. This option is available under File | Open Remote.

The InstallFest 2026 conference is now behind us. We’ll have to wait until October for the next IT conference – LinuxDays 2026. Will we meet there?

Help us to improve LibreOffice’s Swahili translation!

2026-04-27

In the LibreOffice project, our goal isn’t to just make a powerful office suite – but to also make it usable for as many people as possible. And a big part of that is translating the user interface, help content and websites. LibreOffice (the app itself) is available in over 120 languages, thanks to our worldwide translation and localisation communities. But we want to do more!

Some translations need more work, for example – such as Swahili (also known as Kiswahili). This language has an estimated 150 – 200 million native and second-language speakers, primarily in Tanzania and Kenya. Swahili is one of three official languages of the East African Community countries, and one of the working languages of the African Union.

LibreOffice’s Swahili (Tanzanian variant) translation is currently 33% complete, so we’d love to get some more help here. If you speak the language, you can help to improve it:

Read the guide to translating LibreOffice
Start using Weblate, our translation system, to add Swahili to the user interface
Post on our localisation mailing list or in the Telegram group if you need help

Thank you in advance for any help you can give! And of course, we’re always happy to see translations of LibreOffice in other languages too. So if the software is missing your language, please let us know and let’s improve it 😊

Category: Community