[Mailman-i18n] Re: New to i18n

Vizi Szilard vizisz@freemail.hu
Thu, 7 Jun 2001 11:05:01 +0200


Hello,

Welcome on the board!

Sumit Rajan Srivastava wrote:
> I am new to i18n. Can you please help me with some details on i18n 
> or tell me the website where I can get a detailed information on i18n ?    
Here I am gonna tell you how to translate Mailman to your language.

First of all you need the latest version from the CVS, because none of 
the so far announced versions are capable of manage different languages.
You can download the latest version from CVS with eg. the following
command:
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.mailman.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/mailman co mailman

(this should be a single line, if not that is because the mail clients
wrap the long lines)
This creates a mailman/ directory in you current directory. If you want
to install this version, you need also the Mimelib 0.3 package and at
least Python 2.0.

You can find Mimelib here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mimelib/
Latest Python's home is at: http://www.python.org

Install mimelib as the readme says, and after that install Mailman with
the regular commands (eg. ./configure; make install)

So back to the translation. 

You should translate two things, one is called templates. These files
you can found in the templates/ directory. These are basicly textfiles,
some of them are HTMLs, but you can edit them with your favourite texteditor.
You have to translate the English ones from the templates/en/ dir.
Translate all of these file and you will see that a lot of message will
appear in your own language, but some of them still be in English, this
is where the second thing comes in, the catalog.

You will find a message.pot in the mailman/messages/ directory. It contains
a lot of text from the code of Mailman. Make a copy of this file and start 
translate it, keep in mind the following rules:

 - your translation have to be in the msgstr line, you MUST NOT edit
   the msgid line.
 - there are certain words that you MUST NOT translate, this words 
   look something like this: %(...)s
   You can change the place of this words in the line, but you shouldn't
   modify them at all.
 - do not translate the commands' names, eg. in the MailCommandHandler.py
   file there are a lot of lines like this:
   msgid "Usage: password [<oldpw> <newpw>]"
   Here 'password' is the command, everything else you can translate,
   you can translate password every where else, where it is not
   refered as a command. eg. in here:
   msgid "  (You can change your password there, too.)"

I think these things are the most important. If you a bit confused look
at the Spanish example in the mailman/messages/es/LC_MESSAGES/mailman.po

If you want to test your translation read the README-I18.en

With your problems please contact to the mailman-i18n mailinglist, 
I am sure someone will help you.

And finally when you done with the translation there are two persons
who can help you distribute the translation.

The Mailman i18n project-leader:
 Juan Carlos Rey Anaya <jcrey@uma.es>
And the main developer of Mailman:
 Barry A. Warsaw <barry@digicool.com>

Good luck.

Szilard Vizi
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