Internationalization

Mailman 2.1 is fully internationalized. This means you can add translations of all the email and web templates so that your users can interact with your mailing lists in their native language. Internationalization is handled as follows:
  • Each Mailman installation has a server default language. Mailman ships with US English as the server default.

  • Mailman comes with many supported languages, and if your language is on that list, it will just work.

  • Individual list owners can choose which languages they'd like their mailing list to support from the suite of site-enabled languages. The list owner can also select the list's default language. Mailing lists can thus be monolingual (with English or any other installed language as the default), or they can be multilingual.

  • Individual users can choose what their preferred language is, from the set of list-enabled languages. Thus, if a list is multilingual, the user can choose which language they'd prefer when interacting with Mailman.
It must be noted that Mailman never actually translates the messages that flow through its mailing lists. It's up to the list members to adhere to their community's language conventions.

Mailman Language Champions

Each language translation has a champion who coordinates updates and submits them to the Mailman project. If the language you are interested is listed here, please contact the champion for details. If your language is not listed here, or if you have general questions about I18N Mailman, please contact the mailman-i18n@python.org mailing list.

We are investigating using the Translation Project for future language support.

Catalan
Jordi Mallach is heading up the Catalan translation effort.

Chinese Simplified (GB), and Big5
Max Yu heads up the Simplified Chinese translation effort. Michael Fang contributed a Big5 mailman.po file, but I've had some trouble converting it to a .mo file with msgfmt. Assistance would be greatly appreciated!

Czech
Dan Ohnesorg heads up the Czech translation effort, which has been assisted by V. Stanovsky.

Danish
Thomas von Hassel and Soren Bondrup are heading up the Danish translations.

Dutch
Danny Terweij and Sander Steffann head up the Dutch translation.

Estonian
Anti Veeranna heads up the Estonian translation effort.

Finnish
Pekka Haavisto heads up the Finnish translation effort.

French
Pascal GEORGE and Ousmane Wilane head up the French translation effort, with a mailing list hosted by Fil at http://listes.rezo.net/mailman/listinfo/mailman-fr.

German
Peer Heinlein is now the German translation champion.

Hungarian
Vizi Szilard heads up the Hungarian translation effort, with some help from Szabolcs Szigeti and Gabor Funk.

Italian
Simone Piunno is heading up the Italian translations, with help from many others. Simone has created an Italian mailing list for those wishing to help: http://mailman.ferrara.linux.it/listinfo/mailman-it/

Japanese
Tokio Kikuchi maintains the Japanized Mailman Page and also runs a mailing list for Japanese Mailman users, for which the archives are publically available.

Korean
song@yaimma.co.kr has volunteered to head up the Korean translation effort.

Lithuanian
Mantas Kriauciunas has contributed a Lithuanian translation.

Norwegian
Daniel Buchmann heads up the Norwegian translation effort. See also his Norwegian Mailman Page.

Polish
Contrary to what you might think knowing my last name, I don't know a word of Polish. :) Fortunately, Pawel Kolodziejczyk, Marcin Sochacki, and Marcin Zaborowski have volunteered to spearhead the Polish translations.

Portuguese
The following folks are working on the Portuguese translations: They are working on both the Brazilian (pt_BR) and Portuguese (pt_PT) translations, with help from Jose Paulo Moitinho de Almeida.

Russian
Mikhail Sobolev has volunteered to head up the Russian translation effort. There is also a Russian Mailman list for discussion of the Russian translation.

Spanish
Juan Carlos Rey Anaya heads up the Spanish translations.

Swedish
We're looking for a Swedish champion to continue this effort. Please contact Daniel Buchmann if you can volunteer.

Turkish
Erdinc Guler heads up the Turkish translation effort.