[SM-I18N] Squirrelmail 1.4.0 problem with TranslateGettext

[Lorenzo C. <lch...@as...>]

Hello everyone.
I have installed Squirrelmail 1.4.0 with Apache 1.3.23 (rpm) and PHP
4.3.1 (compiled with gettext support) on a RedHat 7.3 system.

I would like to use the italian localization so I have used the conf.sh
script to set the Default Language to it_IT.

When I login to Squirrelmail with any user I still get the English
version. Reading the document

http://www.squirrelmail.org/wiki/en_US/TranslateGettext

it reports that this could be due to gettext not liking my kernel or
maybe PHP not being able to mesh correctly with gettext.

Does anyone have any idea what this means? 
Do I need to install support for the Italian language on my Linux box? 
Is there any debugging feature I could use to figure out what is going
on?

Any help is appreciated.

Regards,
Lorenzo Chiavacci