[Mailman-Developers] features suggestion: languages

[Dan Ohnesorg]

On Fri, 21 May 1999, Juan Carlos Rey Anaya wrote:



I am also to interested in localization, my domain is Czech language.

> We see the multilingual issue as a three pronged one:
> 	- The mail messages sent by the MLM to the users.
It is generealy not problem, becouse mailman is transparent for MIME
encodings (We have 15 charactes in ISO-8859-2 character set).

> 	- The apparence of web pages.
It can be modified by exchanging templates in directories. I have made it
and it works fine, the only problem is, that for example labels on buttons
are hard genertated from source code.

> 	- And the commands used to control the MLM via e-mail.
>
Here should by done some work, if I will send czech message, i need modify
headers from e-mail. Mailman generates only US-ASCII headers and by
templetas I can modify only body of message.

Command should not be translated. Only, and it is not localization
subject, I am modifiing every version to recognize more command as
aliases, like sub, subscribe, add...

 
> 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
Yes, it can be done like this.

> 
> The system messages would use a similar directory structure. A new
> directory, called $prefix/messages, would be created, to hold the
> supported languages.
Yes and the messages should contains not only body, but also headers from
mail.

> This directory would hold a module per supported language, named
> 'language'.py,

Please check gettext package, which is also suported by python. It is my
preffered way to internationalize aplications.

I think, we can include templates directory in 1.0, to help other with
translation, f.e. in contib directory, it will not automaticaly install,
but it can be manually placed instead of english templates.


cheers
dan



-- 
                    ________________________________________
DDDDDD             
DD   DD                Dan Ohnesorg, supervisor on POWER     
DD  OOOO               Dan@feld.cvut.cz
DD OODDOO              Dep. of Power Engineering
DDDDDD OO              CTU FEL Prague, Bohemia
   OO  OO              work: +420 2 24352785;+420 2 24972109
    OOOO               home: +420 311 679679;+420 311 679311
                    ________________________________________

Pesimista vidi v ementalskem syru jen ty diry.