After some gentle prodding, I revisited the whole Internationalization issue with BitWise. For some time now, we have offered translations of the BitWise client in Spanish, French, German and Dutch (we'd love to have more!), but obtaining these translation files required navigating our English-only website. After some looking around, I found that I could not only present the entire setup program in other languages, but could even have the setup download your translation file automatically (if one exists for your language)!
While I recognize that no one would read my blog who doesn't speak English, pretend for a moment you speak only German. If you download BitWise now from a German download site (think German version of download.com), you are presented with a setup program completely in English (luckily, hitting "next" repeatedly does the "right" things). Then, when you run BitWise, it's all in English... making it difficult to use and understand. Fast forward to version 1.0.3 to be released this month: when you run the setup program, you are asked what language to use for the setup, and German is selected by default. The whole setup program is in German, and at the end of the setup, the installer automatically downloads and installs the German translation file, so when you run BitWise, BitWise is in German.
These changes will clearly make BitWise much more accessible to our international users, and we're very proud of being able to cater to people all over the world. We'd love to have additional volunteers translate BitWise into even more languages; if you'd like to help, please visit our Translation Forum for more information. We're especially interested in new translations for Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese and Japanese. We would be endlessly grateful and you would be helping many, many people use the greatest IM program in the world. :) It's relatively easy and our translators so far have found it to be fun.