Mailman - The GNU Mailing List Management System Copyright (C) 2001-2003 by the Free Software Foundation, Inc. 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA INTERNATIONALIZATION Mailman 2.1 is multilingual. By default it supports English, but additional languages may also be available. If the language you want to add is already supported by Mailman, then getting all your lists to also support that language is fairly easy. You just need to go to the administrative web pages, click on the "Languages" category, and select the languages you want your list to support. If the language you want to use has not been previously translated, or you don't know where to find the language pack for your language, read the section below or contact the Mailman internationalization mailing list mailman-i18n@python.org. ADDING NEW TRANSLATIONS Suppose you want to add new translations for a previously unsupported language, what steps would you need to take? First, you should send a message to mailman-i18n@python.org to make sure nobody has already created the translations for your language. In the example below, we're going to create a translation for the mythical language "Fredonia" which has the official language code of "xx". You should see http://www.list.org/i18n.html for more information on internationalizing Mailman. Also, Simone Piunno -- who is the Italian translation champion -- has written up some nice instructions, which are provided below. In general you need to do two things to add translations for a language in Mailman. You need to translate the message catalog and you need to translate the templates. To translate the message catalog, grab the file messages/mailman.pot and make a copy called mailman.po in the subdirectory messages/xx/LC_MESSAGES. Then you edit the file and add the translations for each message identified in the catalog. It will be very helpful to have a good tool, such as KDE's KBabel tool, or po-mode for Emacs, for this part of the job. Once you've added your translations, you can then run msgfmt over your .po file to generate messages/xx/LC_MESSAGE/mailman.mo. Next, create the subdirectory templates/xx and translate each of the files in templates/en/*.{html,txt}. These you should also donate back to the Mailman project. To make Mailman and your lists aware of the new language, follow the directions in the section above. TRANSLATION HINTS Q: If your language uses non-ASCII characters, such as the cedilla in French, how should you add these to the catalogs and templates? A: For any message that is destined for the web interface, use an HTML entity reference where appropriate. For messages destined for email, you should use the non-ASCII characters explicitly. This includes both for the message catalog and the templates. RESYNCHRONIZING THE CATALOG As Mailman development continues, new updated catalogs (i.e. mailman.pot files) will be made available. As mailman.pot changes, the individual language catalogs (i.e. xx/LC_MESSAGES/mailman.po files) need to be updated as well. In general, I as the Mailman maintainer will merge the new catalogs with the individual language catalogs, and commit the updates to CVS. Translators should grab the new mailman.po files from CVS and update the translated messages. They should also update the template translations. For best results, you will probably want to keep current on changes to Mailman 2.1 in the CVS. As Mailman 2.1 moves towards final release, the catalogs and templates should start to stabilize. Alternatively, occasionally I will make new English language packs available on SourceForge, and you can use these to create your translations. DONATING YOUR TRANSLATION BACK TO MAILMAN We'd really appreciate it if you donate your translations back to the Mailman project, so that others can benefit from your effort. You'll get credit of course, in the Mailman documentation. Here are the steps to donate your translations, either the first time or subsequent updates. The best thing to do is to send me a "tarball", i.e. a gzip'd tarfile, that can be unpacked in the top level directory of the Mailman CVS tree. This would be the directory containing this README-I18N.en file. Your tarball should contain two directories, where your donated language is `xx': templates/xx messages/xx In templates/xx there should be the translated templates, all the .txt and .html files, for your language, mirroring those in the English template directory (always the master copy). In messages/xx you should have a single directory LC_MESSAGES, and in that directory a file called mailman.po, which is the human readable catalog for your language. Do not send me the mailman.mo file, since I'll recreate it on my end, and that'll save on the size of the tarball. That's basically it. If you need to include a README, please call it README.xx and put it in the messages/xx directory. README.xx can be in your native language. You can email the tarball to me, and if this is the first installation of the language, please tell me what the add_language() call in Defaults.py.in should be for your language. CURRENT LIST OF LANGUAGE SUPPORTED OUT-OF-THE BOX As of this writing (23-Dec-2002), Mailman 2.1 supports the following languages out of the box: - Czech - Chinese (Simplified and Traditional, but may have problems) - Dutch - English - Estonian - Finnish - French - German - Hungarian - Italian - Japanese - Korean - Lithuanian - Norwegian - Portuguese (Brazil) - Russian - Spanish - Swedish We've also had volunteers for these languages, although they aren't yet integrated into the code base: - Catalan - Polish MORE INSTRUCTIONS Here is the recipe that Simone Piunno used for the Italian translations: "You can start without much technical knowledge, but if you want to keep your translation up-to-date (while the development branch evolves into the next stable release) you'd better learn how to use cvs and diff. Here is my recipe. Basically, you'll start by copying templates/en/* to your sandbox dir and then translating each file. Keep in mind that %(foo)s is a variable reference (much like %s in C) and must be left untouched. Also, you must be able to recognize a markup tag (eg, ) because they must be left untouched too, and you should know how to escape non-ASCII characters, e.g. "è" -> "è", but only in html files. Remember that if you need a literal % sign, it must be doubled: %% Next, you copy messages/mailman.pot, renaming it to serbian.po. You can open this file with kbabel (a tool included in KDE SDK) and translate each string (original on the higher half of the window, your translation on the bottom half). If you are a masochist, you can even use emacs PO mode ;) Keep attention to the same markers and escaping as above, with the added complexity that here it's harder to say when a string is html (e.g. used for web UI) or pure text (e.g used for email interface) Then you try to compile you .po file: msgfmt -v -o serbian.mo serbian.po No error messages should appear. Next, copy your files on an installed mailman tree, and run bin/transcheck XX, where XX is your coutry code. No warning should appear (but maybe some warning is ok, if you really know what you're doing). Now, try to run your translation (add an "add_language" line to Mailman/Defaults.py) and check the many scattered pieces blend together well. Sometimes you'll need some adjustment. When you're satistied, pack up a tar.gz with the following structure: messages/XX/LC_MESSAGES/mailman.po messages/XX/LC_MESSAGES/mailman.mo templates/XX/admindbdetails.html templates/XX/admindbpreamble.html . . templates/XX/userpass.txt templates/XX/verify.txt (XX is your country code) and send it to Barry Warsaw. By that time, your translation could be somewhat obsolete, because templates and mailman.pot could have been evolved meanwhile. Don't panic. You'll need to check diffs to find what changed and how, so that you can easily update your files. Save everything everytime, you'll need it. 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