Brian Candler writes:

That would be useful in multi-lingual environments, but the language preference sent by the browser should be pre-selected.

On some systems ispell is really aspell. And the aspell docs indicate it's going to be merged into pspell. The only way I can see of listing aspell languages is to go through its dictionary files, and the problem with that is they have names that start with things like "american" rather than using ISO language codes. Not insuperable, but at build time you'd have to detect what ispell really was and pick the appropriate look-up table (to be used at run-time because dictionaries may be added later).

That's an unfortunate example - you have to look through the code to figure out what it does. :)

A simpler example is:

<td align="right">Domain: </td> <td align="left">[#h#]&nbsp;</td>

Changing the Domain line to, say,

<td align="right">[#S593#]</td>

or something like that (I didn't delve through the code to see if that conflicts with existing usage, but the idea is to assign a unique identifier to each bit of text) would do the trick. There are more complicated solutions of dealing with translations but they seem to be kitchen sink jobs that actually slow down the process of getting translations done, require the installation of packages that most people don't have, are hard to drive, etc.

Qmailadmin uses language files with names like pt-BR and contents like

000 ISO-8859-1 001 Menu principal 002 Conta de correio [...]

Anyone with a text editor can produce a translation for another language and drop it in. No special tools needed, no steep learning curve. The file can be sent to Sam for inclusion in the next distribution (possibly better to have a separate zip of these as well so that people don't have to upgrade sqwebmail to get a new language).

The qmailadmin method works. Looking at sources I have lying around, three years after the translation scheme was put in place there were 17 supported languages and four years after there were 19 supported languages (I suspect the slow-down in translations occurred because of lack of demand for other languages). Nineteen languages isn't a lot, but it's a lot more than sqwebmail has, and qmailadmin gets a lot less use than sqwebmail. I think that with a translation scheme along these lines we'd see a lot of translations appear in a matter of months.

That would probably require a bit of conditional coding to display or not display the expired or invalid message so that the relevant message IDs could be embedded on the page (it makes translation easier if you can see where "S495 Invalid Login" appears because some strings may be ambiguous when read out of context).