GNU Mailman is a mailing list management system that has been in production use since 1998. In December 2002, a version 2.1 was released containing many new features. This paper will describe one of the most important – Mailman 2.1’s internationalization support. Presented here are the tools that were built and the approaches Mailman took to marking and translating text, as well a review of some of the benefits and pitfalls of Mailman’s solution. Also presented will be some future directions for internationalized Mailman, as well as other complex Python applications such as Zope.
Barry A. Warsaw