[Mailman-Developers] multi-lingual mailing lists

[Aidan Cully]

Forgive me for taking a while to get to the point...  I feel the need to
give some background.  For the impatient, scroll down to the block labeled
'THE POINT'.

On the Gnome development list, there's been some discussion, lately, about
allowing the non-English speaking world to communicate in their native
tongues on the list.  There's probably some English chauvinism in my
attitude, but I don't like the idea of having people send messages in
non-English languages to an English list...  It seems to me that the project
is global enough that if people start communicating in non-"standard"
languages, without necessarily providing a mechanism for allowing people
that don't speak the language to filter out those messages, the signal/noise
can get pretty bad.  At the same time, I agree with the need for people to
be able to participate in a large community, without necessarily needing to
speak English.

By having one-language mailing lists, a large percentage of the community
might be excluded from the discussion.  Right now, almost all discussions
take place in English, and if a French list were to fork off, I suspect
that, even though a good chunk of Aussies, Brits, Americans, &c. probably
speak French, they would still just subscribe to the English list, and the
French list would be nigh useless.

THE POINT:

I think it would be a good idea for mailing-list software to manage multiple
language support.  The mechanism I'm imagining involves setting up a bunch
of '<listname>-<language>@<product>.org' submission addresses for the same
list.  The list server would then use a per-user preference setting to
decide which members of the list want to receive mail in the message's
language.  The message is then sent out using that <listname>, and the
Reply-To: header is set to <listname>-<language>@<product>.org.  Maybe also
have an X-Language: header, automatically inserted by the list server.  By
default, subscribe people to all languages.

Does this make sense?  Or sound like a good idea?  Please CC: me in all
replies, as I'm not a subscriber.

--aidan