From the engineering ticket:

Customers want ability to customize Granite models in non-English languages. Granite 3.1 base models have support for German, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. So this feature brings capabilities for users to customize and fine-tune the Granite 3.1 model in German, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.

With the current Mixtral 7x8b teacher model the focus are:

• Spanish
• French
• Italian
• Geman

With 3rd-party teacher models (e.g. LLama 3.3 70B, Qwen 2.5 72B, etc.)

• Japanese
• Portuguese
• Polish

Documentation:

Potentially just a release note, not sure what else is going to be needed here