[Mailman-i18n] ways to prioritize what to translate?

[Bruno Haible]

Hello,

On the translation-i18n mailing list some translators said that they
were not willing to translate the entire mailman POT file because it
was so big, and many messages appeared to be in a context never seen
by a mailing list subscriber.

Would it be possible for the mailman project to prioritize the messages
according to the target user role?

I was told that mailman has three types of users: admins, editors,
subscribers. They see different output from mailman. I would estimate
that the localization of the parts that reaches subscribers is higher
priority than the rest. (Because when you have 5 people or more starting
a mailing list, you can expect to find one of them who understands
English; this person then can become the list administrator.)

For the translators, it is acceptable to have 3 POT files instead of
a single POT file; it is also acceptable to keep everything in a single
POT file which has extracted tags (#. syntax) that indicate the target
user (e.g. "#. to subscribers") or prioritization (e.g. "#. +", "#. ++",
"#. +++").

If distinct user roles are handled by distinct source files, you can
simply pass different file lists in 3 different xgettext invocations.
If not, you can use different translation functions instead of _();
xgettext 0.15 will have an option to create specific extracted tags
in #. syntax depending on the translation function that is used.

Bruno