Mailman3 - Call for Translations (@Weblate)

TL;DR; please help localizing Mailman3 [1]. You can find it on hosted Weblate [2].The next component releases are planned in 1-2 weeks from now. Thanks for your contribution! If you can't make it now, please consider working on Mailman3 translations at some later point of time. Thanks!

Time has come for Mailman3

Over the last months I have found an interest in Mailman3. Given the EOL of Python2 in January 2020 and also being a heavy Mailman2 provider for various of my projects and also for customers, I felt it was time to look at Mailman2's successor: Mailman3 [1].

One great novelty in Mailman3 is the strict split up between backend (Mailman Core), and the frontend components (django-mailman3, Postorius, Hyperkitty). All three are Django applications. Postorius is the list management web frontend whereas Hyperkitty is an archive viewer. Other than in Mailman2, you can also drop list posts into Hyperkitty directly (instead of sending a mail to the list). This makes Hyperkitty also some sort of forum software with a mailing list core in the back. The django-mailman3 module knits the previous two together (and handles account management, login dialog, profile settings, etc.).

Looking into Mailman3 Upstream Code

Some time back in midst 2019 I decided to deploy Mailman3 at a customer's site and also for my own business (which still is the test installation). Living and working in Germany, my customers' demand often is a fully localized WebUI. And at that time, Mailman3 could not provide this. Many exposed parts of the Mailman3 components were still not localized (or not localizable).

Together with my employee I put some hours of effort into providing merge requests, filing bug reports, request better Weblate integration (meaning: hosted Weblate), improving the membership scripting support, etc. It felt a bit like setting the whole i18n thing in motion.

Call for Translations

Over the past months I had to focus on other work and two days ago I was delighted that Abhilash Raj (one of the Mailman3 upstream maintainers) informed me (via closing one of the related bugs [3]) that Mailman3 is now fully integrated with the hosted Weblate service and a continous translation workflow is set to go.

The current translation stati of the Mailman3 components are at ~ 10%. We can do better than this, I sense.

So, if you are a non-native English speaker and feel like contributing to Mailman3, please visit the hosted Weblate site [2], sign up for an account (if you don't have one already), and chime in into the translation of one of the future mailing list software suites run by many FLOSS projects all around the globe. Thanks a lot for your help.

As a side note, if you plan working on translating Mailman Core into your language (and can't find it in the list of supported languages), please request this new language via the Weblate UI. All other components have all available languages enabled by default.

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