[Mailman-Developers] Internationalization

[Francois Bedard]

Following up on the lead by Harald Meland, Tomas Fasth, John Viega and
earlier postings in the archives...

As preliminary research for a project at the Universite du Quebec a
Montreal, we've been looking for an open source mailing list manager
which could be translated into French - or, better yet,
internationalized so that local versions could be easily produced for
any number of languages. We haven't yet decided on what program would be
the most interesting - we might go with Sympa, which already offers a
French interface alongside the default English one, as we might drop the
project altogether. On the other hand, should we decide mostly on the
basis of perceived potential, Mailman, for little we've seen, would
appear to have a number of commending features: Python being one, the
web interface, GNU label and apparent dynamism being others.

Our objective is more ambitious than that expressed by Harald Meland
though. We'd specifically like to:

1) Translate the web interface and all messages generated by Mailman.
2) Translate the commands (e.g. "subscribe" and the like) or offer the
possibility of using either the English form or a local version - the
reason being that intended users might include people unfamiliar with
both English and computers.
3) Add any such feature as would be needed to preserve the integrity of
the content (I'm thinking accented characters and the like) where
possible, or its sensible adaptation where limitations would so dictate
(that is, a preference for Unicode over ASCII and ASCII over garbled).

We'd appreciate if someone could give us an idea of the work involved to
bring this about. Any comment on the comparative merits of Mailman would
come handy as well.

Since interest has by now been expressed for a number of languages,
perhaps this could be made into a more concerted effort...

Thanks to all,

Francois Bedard
UQAM
Montreal