[tei-council] more on internationalization

[Sebastian Rahtz]

Christian Wittern wrote:

>I think one way to proceed would to form a subcommitee (not necessary
>only from the Council) for handling this and leave the details on how
>to proceed to them.  However, we should define our requirements before,
>e.g. what languages we want to cover etc. 
>
>  
>
since Alejandro did so much work already, I think it would be well
worth finishing Spanish.  I also think French should be done, for 
historical reasons.
After that, how to decide on priorities?

 * How many Danes doing text encoding cannot read English?
 * how many Bulgarians do text encoding?
 * can we ever get the encoding right for Chinese?
 * what's the best language for India?

I think we may have to be driven by who comes forward.

what's the timescale on this application, Julia?

My main worry about starting this exercise is that it provides a distraction
from P5, and is impacted by it. Since the elements and attributes for P5
are not frozen yet, is it sensible to start translating? yes, 99% of it 
will be unchanged,
but there is a management problem if we are trying to merge material into
a moving target.

Note the discussions around Ghent-time about where to store this stuff.
Back then we were thinking that the translations should be external
(as in current teinames.xml), mainly because attributes are repeated so 
much.
However, then we talked about names, and I think we mostly agreed that 
"type"
always means the same thing; but is its <desc>/<gloss> the same in each 
case?
how much do we normalize the description of attributes; and if we don't, how
do we avoid translating the same text hundreds of times?

-- 
Sebastian Rahtz      
Information Manager, Oxford University Computing Services
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431

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