## 2.3 The Language Options Category

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 languages 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.