Mailman is multilingual and internationalized, meaning you can set up
your list so that members can interact with it in any of a number of
natural languages. Of course, Mailman won't translate list
postings. :)
However, if your site administrator has enabled its support, you can
set your list up to support any of about two dozen languages, such as
German, Italian, Japanese, or Spanish. Your list members can then
choose any of your supported languages as their preferred
language for interacting with the list. Such things as their member
options page will be displayed in this language. Each mailing list
also has its own preferred language which is the language the
list supports if no other language context is known.
These variables control the language settings for your mailing list:
preferred_language
This is the list's preferred language, which is the language that
the list administrative pages will be displayed in. Also any
messages sent to the list owners by Mailman will be sent in this
language. This option is presented as a drop-down list containing
the language enabled in the available_languages variable.
available_languages
This set of checkboxes contains all the natural languages that
your site administrator has made available to your mailing lists.
Select any language that you'd either like your members to be able
to view the list in, or that you'd like to be able to use in your
list's preferred_language variable.
encode_ascii_prefixes
If your mailing list's preferred language uses a non-ASCII
character set and the subject_prefix contains non-ASCII
characters, the prefix will always be encoded according to the
relevant standards. However, if your subject prefix contains only
ASCII characters, you may want to set this option to Never
to disable prefix encoding. This can make the subject headers
slightly more readable for users with mail readers that don't
properly handle non-ASCII encodings.
Note however, that if your mailing list receives both encoded and
unencoded subject headers, you might want to choose As
needed. Using this setting, Mailman will not encode ASCII
prefixes when the rest of the header contains only ASCII
characters, but if the original header contains non-ASCII
characters, it will encode the prefix. This avoids an ambiguity
in the standards which could cause some mail readers to display
extra, or missing spaces between the prefix and the original
header.