Comment 6 for bug 114503

First, the mozilla-firefox-locale-* will disappear soon, since they are for Firefox 2, and with Firefox 3 we'll get the translations directly in the language packs.

Also, all dependencies are actually designed in a way to *not* pull in the application itself:

  Package: openoffice.org-l10n-fi
  Depends: openoffice.org-common (>= 1:2.4.0~rc2) | language-support-fi

  Package: thunderbird-locale-de
  Depends: thunderbird | language-support-de

and so on, thus the oo-l10n-* packages can be installed *without* openoffice itself being installed. The alternative dependency will make sure that installing l-support-* won't install the application, but installing thunderbird-locale-fr will properly pull in thunderbird itself if you don't have the French language-support package installed.