[tei-council] more on internationalization

[Christian Wittern]

Julia,

I think this is an excellent opportunity.


Sebastian Rahtz <sebastian.rahtz at computing-services.oxford.ac.uk> writes:

> Julia Flanders wrote:
>
>>
>> 1. Provide the TEI tagset in several languages other than English
>> --complete the existing provision for tag names and attributes in
>> German, French, and Spanish
>
> It would also help a lot, of course, to translate the <desc> or
> <gloss> for each element and attribute.
> Without that, its not clear whether anyone will use the translated
> names.

I second this.  Even translated tag-names might be difficult to
understand due to the necessary terseness.  Translated tag-names also
open the door to all kinds of misunderstandings when talking about the
tags; but I do see the neccessity.  
<desc> and <gloss> on the other hand are slightly more verbose and
with things like oxygen, they can even be displayed directly to the
encoder while doing the work.  BTW, I have been wondering if the
current ODDs do allow for multiple, multilingual <desc> and <gloss>
elements?  

I know of a group in Taiwan that might be interested to chime in with
Chinese, and even for Japanese I could try to do something, if this
sounds interesting.  Getting funding for this over here, is probably a
different story

> The German took about 2 man weeks, I think. But that was problematic,
> because Arno was
> not very familiar with the territory, and Christian thinks some of his
> words are not right.
> So each translation needs a reviewer.

Ideally the translator should be familiar with the TEI Guidelines and
text encoding.  And yes, the budget should allow for a review process.

All the best,

Christian

-- 

 Christian Wittern 
 Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University
 47 Higashiogura-cho, Kitashirakawa, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8265, JAPAN