Re: [Evolution] mail i18n issues

[Jamie Zawinski <jwz jwz org>]

Dan Winship wrote:
> Are there any standards/proposals/theories on the internationalization
> of strings like
>
>         In-Reply-To: Your message of DATE <MSGID>
>
>         On DATE, PERSON wrote:

These should be localized strings.

>         This is a multipart message in MIME format.

This probably shouldn't be, since it's not user-visible.  But maybe it
should be, I dunno.  Either way, this one isn't as important.  It's
essentially mailer error text.

> Failing a good solution, do people think it is better to write pretty
> text in English or write ugly language-neutral text. (Eg,
> "In-Reply-To: <MSGID>", and skip the other two entirely.)

Don't mix up headers and body text.  The things you cited above are
meant for humans and are not machine parsable.  The In-Reply-To header
is something else entirely.

I talked a bit about what common formats for the In-Reply-To header are
in <http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html>.

Bottom line is, I think you should only ever emit References, and never
emit In-Reply-To.  Though you should parse them both, and that document
has the world's best algorithm for doing so.

> Is it common for mailers in other countries to translate the English
> message header names to local forms for display?

I don't know how common it is, but I've seen people who even translate
the string "Re:".  That's really bad, and I believe DRUMS explicitly
makes it an illegal thing to do.

-- 
Jamie Zawinski
jwz jwz org             http://www.jwz.org/
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