[tei-council] Values of @xml:lang on <exemplum>

Laurent Romary laurent.romary at loria.fr
Thu Apr 30 11:03:19 EDT 2009


What James is alluded to is an essential description in, e.g.,  
terminoly. That is between working and object (which he calls target)  
languages. I quote here the corresponding section of ISO 16642 (TMF -  
Terminoogical Markup Framework) and I think we should seriously  
consider making this distinction ours in the TEI.
Laurent
Any terminological data collection conforming to this TMF should  
clearly distinguish between the working
language and the object language, which are the two types of language  
information that can be attached to any
level of the collection.

The working language is the language used to express any given textual  
content in the data collection. This
information shall be represented using the xml:lang attribute as  
defined in the Extensible Markup Language
(XML) recommendation of the W3C and used accordingly. In particular,  
the scope of the working language is
the whole sub-document starting from the element where the information  
has been declared, unless it is
superseded by another working language declaration for some element in  
this sub-document.

The object language is the language of the terminological information  
which is being described at some level in
the terminological data collection (typically at the language section  
level). As such, it is represented in the TMF
as a data category (“language identifier” in ISO12620) and may be  
represented in a given TML using any style
among those described in this International Standard. Its possible  
values are those allowed by the reference
data category in ISO12620 or a reduced set defined for a given TML.

The following example shows how the two types of language can be used  
within a language section expressed
in GMT:
<struct type="LS" xml:lang="fr">
<feat type="language identifier">en</feat>
<feat type="definition">Unevaleur entre 0 et 1 utilisée...</feat>
<struct type="TS">
<feat type="term" xml:lang="en">alpha smoothing factor</feat>
<feat type="term type">fullForm</feat>
</struct>
</struct>



Le 30 avr. 09 à 15:57, James Cummings a écrit :

>
> Sebastian and I were just discussing this in relationship to examples
> and my desire to decouple them.  In implementation it is fine where  
> the
> Guidelines point to a particular example by @xml:id, you just include
> it.  But sometimes the elementSpec might have an example in another
> language that you wish to appear in the English (or another  
> language's)
> element reference page.  So the logic, I think, is to include all
> exemplum in the target language, and possibly all those with no
> language, and only if those don't exist provide the English example.
> the problem comes when the Chinese want to include a French example.
> The solution we thought of was basically as you have below, but we
> worried about abusing the semantics of exemplum/@xml:lang ... having a
> @targetLang or something might solve this.  So you might get:
>
> <exemplum targetLang="fr">
> <!-- XInclude an example by @xml:id whose own @xml:lang is 'lat' -->
> </exemplum>
> <exemplum targetLang="zh">
> <!-- XInclude the same example -->
> </exemplum>
>
> Not sure...which is why I wanted to avoid talking about  
> implementation. ;-)
>
> -James
>
> David Sewell wrote:
>> This is do-able within the next month. I don't mind taking it on as  
>> my
>> project, as I've been working with similar issues with our UVa Press
>> material.
>>
>> Incidentally, I realized there is a perfectly straightforward (if
>> somewhat hack-ish) solution to handling exempla in Latin, etc.:
>>
>>  <exemplum xml:lang="">
>>    <egXML xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/Examples" xml:lang="la">
>>      <p>GALLIA est omnis divisa in partes tres</p>
>>    </egXML>
>>  </exemplum>
>>
>> which asserts "this exemplum is language-neutral, but the sample  
>> code it
>> contains is in Latin".
>>
>> David
>>
>> On Thu, 30 Apr 2009, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
>>
>>> Excellent to get this sorted.
>>>> I would suggest, then, that we merge cases in #2 with #3 and  
>>>> assign them
>>>> all @xml:lang="". Those exempla are then considered language- 
>>>> neutral for
>>>> purposes of display. I assume that's more important to us than  
>>>> enabling
>>>> people to search for <exemplum>s that happen to be in Old English  
>>>> or
>>>> Arabic or whatever?
>>>>
>>> I am ambivalent about this. But on the whole I think your suggestion
>>> is the only practical one. We can change the schema for the  
>>> Guidelines
>>> to make xml:lang compulsory on <exemplum>, by the way.
>>>
>>> the processing _will_ have to change. Can we get this done
>>> in the next month? how close are you to a listing all the
>>> exempla which need an xml:lang=""? I assume we just assign "en" to
>>> all the others which have no xml:lang at present.
>>>
>>>
>>
>
>
> -- 
> Dr James Cummings, Research Technologies Service, University of Oxford
> James dot Cummings at oucs dot ox dot ac dot uk
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