[Mailman-Developers] features suggestion: languages

[Juan Carlos Rey Anaya]

"Bognar, Attila" wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm quite new to this list.
> I faced a "problem": I run a maillists for Hungarian people and the
> problem is that some of them don't speak english very much. So I
> have/should change the English text to Hungarian.
> 
> So what I suggest:
> when creating a new list, there could be a question, which asks what
> language the list should be.
> The datas of languages could be taken for example from
> ~mailman/templates/hungarian/
> 

Well, we (Victoriano Giralt and I) have the same trouble and we're
thinking on modifying mailman to support different languages. 

We see the multilingual issue as a three pronged one:
	- The mail messages sent by the MLM to the users.
	- The apparence of web pages.
	- And the commands used to control the MLM via e-mail.

At first, we should tack the two fist ones. The last one is not a big
issue thanks to the amazing web user interface :) ;)

Our approach to the problem would be as follows:

- The system should have a default system language, defined at install
time, 
  which will be used for everything unbound to any list.

- The system will have a set of supported languages, that can be
selected
  as list default language (list creation) or by users for interfacing
to  
  system areas not related to a list.

- A list can support a subset of languages of server, one of them being
the list    default language, that will be used for users that don't
select a language and
  and for any list general messages, like the signature appended to list
  messages.

- The user selected language will be used for the web interface and for
personal
  messages, like password reminders.

- The templates will be customisable like they are now, but on different
  languages.

- List info webpage could be shown in any language supported by the
list.

- System logs will be in English. System manager should know what they
are 
  doing :)


This ends the philosophical part. Now the hard implementation issues :)

Directory $prefix/templates would include different directories, each
dedicated to a diferent language, from which the selected new list
languages, would be copied. So, this structure would be replicated for
every list, but only for the list supported languages.

templates/es/  spanish
          de/  german
          bu/  bulgarian
          it/  italian, etc

The system messages would use a similar directory structure. A new
directory, called $prefix/messages, would be created, to hold the
supported languages.
This directory would hold a module per supported language, named
'language'.py,
i.e.: es.py, de.py, bu.py, etc

Each file could have entries like:

--- BEGIN es.py ---
ErrorInvalidPasswd = 'Error: clave incorrecta'
ListNotFound = 'la lista no se encuentra: %s'
DEFAULT_MSG_FOOTER = """_______________________________________________
lista de distribucion %(real_name)s  -  %(real_name)s@%(host_name)s
%(web_page_url)slistinfo/%(_internal_name)s
"""
--- END es.py ---

And to use it:
It should be at the beggining of a program that wants to use it, like:

import MsgLang  -- or whichever name it should have
Msg = MsgLang.MsgLang() -- We are going send messages in the server
default 
                           language
Msg = MsgLang.MsgLang('es') -- We are going to send spanish messages

print Msg.msg('ErrorInvalidPasswd')    returns
'Error: Invalid Password"'

print Msg.msg('ListNotFound') % 'List' should return
'la lista no se encuentra: List'

VBLE = {'web_page_url' : 'http://www.uma.es/', 
        'real_name' : 'Lista', 
        'host_name' : 'uma.es', 
        '_internal_name' : 'XXXX'}
print Msg.msg('DEFAULT_MSG_FOOTER') % VBLE     should return
'_______________________________________________
lista de distribucion Lista - Lista@uma.es
http://www.uma.es/listinfo/XXXX'

We have a little problem, one of us is new to Python, but we won't
reveal who :)

Of course this is open to discussion on this list.
--

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   #----------------0000--(_)--0000---------------#
   |    Juan Carlos Rey Anaya (jcrey@uma.es)      |
   |      Servicio Central de informática         |
   |       Universidad de Málaga - España         |
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