Comment 1 for bug 59116

The current case is already as you describe. Input methods and keyboard layouts are quite separate from the translation metapackages. All of the keyboard layouts are installed already on a fresh system; input methods for Chinese and the like involve installing scim and related software. None of this has anything to do with the translation packages.

For instance, I personally do some occasional typing in greek, hebrew, or Japanese, and also frequently need to use latin-language diacritical marks. For greek and hebrew, I simply add the greek and hebrew layouts to my available layouts, in Preferences -> Keyboard -> Layouts. I also configure in the Layout Options tab, keys to switch between layouts, and a Compose key so I can hit <compose key> ' e to produce é. For Japanese, I've installed scim-anthy, scim-gtk2-immodule, scim-qtimm, and im-switch, and use im-switch -z en_US -s scim to enable it (takes effect when I log out/back in).

Since this behavior is already in place, I'm closing this bug out. Thanks!