As stated in the abstract, this HOWTO is meant for everybody interested in KDE translation. It is not taken for granted that such people are at the same time developers, "geeks", or that they know the ins and outs of all this stuff anyway and just want to check if others are as smart as they are. ;-) On the contrary, translation can be one of the fields for non-programmers and non-techs to contribute to the KDE project if they would like to.
Areas covered are the introduction of new languages to KDE, the ressources available, GUI and doc translation. It can only be a first overview of what is required for practical translation work. It can not provide a thorough explanation of areas as complex as, for instance, the inner workings of SGML as used in KDE documentation. There are extra teams for this. With regard to the SGML example, this would be the documentation team that works closely together with the translation team and is using the same mailing list (kde-i18n-doc@kde.org).
We also don't try to define exactly what is meant by the terms "i18n" (short for "internationalization") or "l10n" (short for localization). For most practical purposes, "i18n" in KDE means as much as "translation related" while "l10n" means something like "pertaining to country specific settings" (currency, units and so on -- all the things you will be able to choose from in the control center of KDE 2). Once more, we are just giving practical hints here, no matter from what area they are coming. For a short explanation of the development side of both terms take a look at developer.kde.org/kde2arch/i18n.html. -- People interested in general OS translation (like translating Linux) may want to take a look at www.li18nux.org.
Having said that, all feedback is highly welcome, of course. Just send an email to thd@kde.org and tell me what you would like to see in here.