Mark Sapiro writes:
Mailman 2.1 is almost 20 years old and predates the common use of unicode and utf-8. That's why the German message catalog is iso-8859-1 encoded. What you did below is the appropriate fix.
Speaking to Johannes and those in his situation:
To be honest, in the past we could have done for you what you did for yourself, but that would surely cause the opposite problem for a lot of existing systems, not to forget annoying the translators. For many years, our European users were perfectly happy with iso-8859-1, and many continued to use that by default in their text (or at least were happy to do so for the relatively few changes they tended to make in footers, list descriptions, and the like). Nowadays of course most systems default to UTF-8, there's little reason to ever use anything different, and so you unfortunately ended up with a system with mixed charsets (I wouldn't go so far as "chaos," I live in Japan and know chaos in charsets intimately ;-).
Until Mailman 2 went EOL from a development point of view a few years ago, we (well, me, but I expect the other devs will agree) didn't think it's worth the chaos for existing Mailman 2 installations that haven't been reconfigured in a decade or so that would certainly ensue from our decision to go "all UTF-8". Sorry about being so inertial about it, but I think it still was the right way to go. Now of course Mailman 2 is EOL, so it makes sense to support you individually (OK, you supported yourself, and we just say "well done" ;-), but not to make changes to Mailman 2.
Sincere regards, Steve