kde-base/kde-meta-3.5.8 has a USE flag "nls". If enabled, kde-base/kde-i18n is pulled in as a dependency. kde-base/kde-meta-4.0.1 does not have such a USE flag that pulls in kde-base/kde-i10n - it would be nice if this could be added to the ebuild Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:
Sorry, but we won't introduce it again. USE flags for optional runtime stuff don't really make sense. Nevertheless, please give my best regards to good old Georgia Augusta which is where I studied, too. :-)
Hmm, what a pitty - I found it very useful to once tell my system that I want to use available localizations (setting the global USE flag nls) instead of manually emerging localizations for every single package which provides one (and manually checking if it does). :-( You've studied in Göttingen, too? It's a small world!
I have the same opinion as "Michael Schachtebeck". There should be a global mechanism which automatically installs available localliztions. It is unacceptable to let the user do the whole investigation if an extra package provides a localization for other packages. I installed KDE 4 and wondered why there is no german translation. I looked at kde.org but there they said german translation is completed. I searched the forums but nowhere was a hint. The old kde-18n was still a 3.5.x release and I thought that KDE 4 is to new at gentoo for localizations. A thread, which I posted, gave me the answer that the package is now called kde-10n. You see it is too much work if you simply want to install translations, which nearly everyone want to have installed. But if you still don't want to introduce the flag, then add a hint output for this to the meta-package so noone have to to the same as I had to do.