I'm interested a lot in this topic too - I think that if we could agree on a feasible and sensible approach, then a lot of the infrastructure could be shared and reused for any language that anyone cared to provide support for... maybe a way of tie-ing mapping dictionaries to arbitrary objects, and then some conventions for naming the various messages... if we decided on the right implementation then automatic content negotiation could be easy to implement, too!
(I am personally interested in Japanese...)
A combination of server settings (environment variables, maybe a Control Panel widget or Locale object) and the desired HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET could be used to decide what language to use. I'm not sure what the cleanest way to do this would be... there are a *lot* of english string literals everywhere in the code right now, so internationalisation would involve at the very least adding one extra level of indirection everywhere those string literals are being used... but I think this could be really good in the long run.
This is unfortunately a much hairier problem than it first appears - for one thing, you do not _truly_ have internationalization without unicode, and the use of unicode raises huge architectural issues - just ask Guido :) These issues go very deep. The string-sig has been working to find some reasonable answer to the unicode dilemma - hopefully the end result of their work will provide a reliable basic level of built-in unicode support that could be used as a starting point for thinking about internationalization. It would be a good thing for one or more champions in the Zope community with an interest in this to start capturing some things such as: o a laundry list of requirements or use cases describing the kind of internationalization support we think we need (e.g. "it should be possible to read and render a file-based DocumentTemplate written in unicode", "it should be possible to create and store a unicode DTML Method", etc.). o a laundry list of known or possible issues related to internationalization. If some folks can get the ball rolling by starting to capture these things, maybe can create something like an internationalization SIG on the new Zope.org that's coming soon and let the SIG champions maintain and evolve those artifacts on the site. If nothing else, this would keep these concerns from being washed away in the raging rapids of the mailing lists... Brian Lloyd brian@digicool.com Software Engineer 540.371.6909 Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com