[tei-council] more on internationalization

[Lou Burnard]

On 22 May 2005, at 10:34, Christian Wittern wrote:
>>
>> 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?


They should do.

I also think it is *much* more useful  to translate e.g. the desc and 
gloss elements than it is to simply translate the tagnames.  Now that 
we have gone to the effort of making it possible for systems to take 
full advantage of the doc umentation within an ODD, providing it in 
languages other than English is definitely the way to go.


 From the Macmini at Burnard Towers