Developers of Sympa

[Rafael Cordones Marcos <address@concealed>]

Hi folks,

I have been searching the Mailman website and have not found any
reference to what I am looking for, i.e. translating e-mail. I am not
talking about translating the software or documentation (i18n)
but translating the e-mails that people send to a mailing list.

I have look through the Sympa website and found the following: 

"Multilingual messages. Binding of language catalogue at run time.
Translated in :

        * English
        [...]
        * French
"

But I think this refers to i18n and not the translation of the
e-mails that are processed by Sympa.

I am looking for the following functionality in a mailing list software:

 * As an administrator:

    - set up some default machine translation (MT) engine.
      For example, I want to use Babelfish for translating between
      English and Spanish but I wat to use some other engine for
      translating between German and Swedish.

    - specify the subject of the mailing list and thus improving the
      translation results. For instance, I can specify that the
      mailing list is about "Technical -> Operating Systems -> Minix"
      (just kidding).

 * As a user:

    - I want to subscribe to the mailing list and specify my
      language (natural) language preferences. Say I want specify
      {Catalan, Spanish, German}.

    - e-mail going to the list gets sent to a machine translation
      before it gets sent to me. I can optionaly say to the
      mailing list software that I want to receive also the original
      message.

    - If I do not like the translation of an e-mail I can choose some
      other machine translation engine. I may decide that some other
      translation engine does a better job or even pay to get
      get better translations. Maybe the administrator forgot to
      specify a machine translation engine for Euskera<->Catalan and I
      know of one that just started operating.

I would appreciate any information you may have on this topic. Maybe
somebody has started implementing this or is already implemented? 
Send me (with a personal CC:) any comments, problems you see on the
aforementioned working schema, flames, ...

Thanks a lot for your time!

Rafa

-- 
Link of the week:
Der flexible Mensch. Robert Kurtz.
[es] http://www.rebelion.org/economia/rkurz011002.htm
[de] http://www.krisis.org/r-kurz_flexible-mensch_folha.html
[en] If you find it, tell me!