[Mailman-Developers] multilingual mailman

[Gerhard Gonter]

According to Sean Reifschneider:
> On Sat, Sep 18, 1999 at 10:27:40AM +0200, Gerhard Gonter wrote:
> >Are there any plans to for non-english user interfaces which can be
> >selected individually by the user or at least for a whole list?
> 
> What about an approach that would use an interface like this:
> 
> 	setlang('German')
> 	print translang['ERROR: You have selected an invalid option ("%s")']
> 	print translang['       Please try again...']
> 
> I imagine a shelve called "German" which has as the key the hash of the
> string, and as the value the translated string.  [...]
> 
> Any comments?

A sophisticated approach like your example with some sort of automatic
translation is certainly an insteresting goal.  Another much simpler
and only partial solution to start with would be a translate a couple
of templates.  This may be sufficient to keep the bulk of non-english
speaking users happy enough to accept mailman.

A modification of Utils.maketext in a way to select a list-specific
templates directory could do the trick, e.g. an additional parameter
which defaults to En_US or C.

The template directory would contain language specific subdirectories
  ~mailman/templates/
     En_US/
     Fr_FR/
     De_DE/

The templates directory could also contain the shelves for the more
sophisticated translation part.

Well...  Just a thought ...

+gg
 
--
Gerhard.Gonter@wu-wien.ac.at  Fax: +43/1/31336/702  g.gonter@ieee.org
Zentrum fuer Informatikdienste, Wirtschaftsuniversitaet Wien, Austria