i18n under way at Gmane: Basque interfaces now visible!

Lars the Gmane-master has initiated a thread at gmane.discuss about a possible Gmane admin interface for list-admins to manage things. He asked how could admins use that, and I answered that i18n-l10n could be a good idea.

So, I told Lars:

One thing, first of all: translate interface message strings. That is, l10n in my language.

Obviously Gmane should go through i18n first... and it would be nice if it did so following the GNU standard, Gettext, as many other pieces of software have done (Mailman, for instance). If all interface messages were in a .po file, then translating the interface of a given list would be easy.

I personally admin 3 Basque lists hosted at Gmane. The proper way to translate the interfaces would not be taking strings one by one in each list, and then in the next one... I should be able to upload the .po file with all strings to every list I admin.

That way, it would be enough that just one non-English group admin translates a given message set, so that others can re-use it. For instance, Lars produces the Danish file. Then other group admins can follow (some repository could be created for submissions). I don't know how many non-English lists are there, but for those, this would be an interesting feature. For English language lists, well, perhaps someone might be tempted to change some messages for whatever reason, and there might be some usage of this feature, but obviously this is a feature for the other languages mainly.

Lars answered that gettext approach didn't match well with his PHP software... But he managed quickly to set up a system that works. Now, just 24 hours after the thread begun, Basque lists look Basque now, at least at a first glance.

Now, we want just more, you see... you feed us with a little bit of i18n, and we want MORE of it... The msg strings... From, Subject... Then the posting interface, date formats...