[Mailman-i18n] i18n tools/infrastructure/community for mailman

[Jeremy Baron]

Hi,

A user from the Marathi Wikimedia community (an Indic language, ISO
639-2: mr) has recently requested mailman be translated to Marathi or
add support for it to translatewiki.net so that the community could do
it.

I replied[0] and pointed to your docs:
> See http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/Internationalization (kinda recent)
> and http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/Managing+Translations (ancient)

However, given you seem to be unhappy with your current status quo for
i18n on the v2 branch and v3 is (how far away from release? from beta?
I have no idea) I thought you might be interested in hearing about a
solution that could work with your current gettext files and other
templates: https://translatewiki.net

gettext is supported but I'm still inquiring about your templates
folder. (e.g. [1] vs. [2]). It could be that this requires some
additional PHP development, but it's rarely more than a day of
work[3].

You can host it yourself or you can use the hosted copy at
translatewiki.net. If you use the hosted copy then you can take
advantage of the existing community of experienced translators for
many languages who are then able to seamlessly work on mailman strings
in the same site they're familiar with from translating other projects
like MediaWiki, OpenStreetMap, StatusNet, etc. As one
translatewiki.net user just mentioned, "the biggest advantage of
having localisations done at translatewiki is its community".

Looking forward to your opinions. We're a heavy user of mailman at
Wikimedia, and we care a lot about language support. We have
Wikipedias in ~280 languages and Wikimedia has mailman lists in at
least ~67 languages.[4]

-Jeremy

P.S. I've been lurking in #mailman and I plan stick around there
(screen'd) a few weeks at least feel free to send any questions my way
on or off list or in the channel. If there's interest in using the
site, we can have a meeting with translatewiki.net staff and any
interested people from the mailman side.

[0] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-i18n/2012-January/000377.html
[1] http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mailman-coders/mailman/2.1/view/head:/templates/en/admlogin.html
[2] http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mailman-coders/mailman/2.1/view/head:/templates/nl/admlogin.html
[3] https://translatewiki.net/docs/Translate/html/FFS_8php.html
[4] I did some rough calculations based on what I could determine
guess per list with little work; here are #s of lists per language.
not perfect because I only gave each list one lang and there are some
with multiple. Used the public list overview @ lists.wikimedia.org.
> 110 en, 14 de,  9 es,  8 fr,  7 nl,  5 pt,  4 sv ru
>   3 zh uk tr sr pl ko fi
>   2 te ta ro no ms mr mk kn ja it hr hi he gu fa cs bn bg be bd
>   1 vi ur sw sk sah sa pa or nn my ml lb kok km ka is id ia hu hk
>     gd fil eu eo el dk da cak ca as ar als