[tei-council] more on exemplum/@xml:lang in Specs files
David Sewell
dsewell at virginia.edu
Wed May 13 11:17:09 EDT 2009
I'm mostly done with language tagging of the exampla in the P5 source
under the Specs directory, but just want to run my logic by everyone to
be sure it is acceptable. If it is, I'll let Sebastian know how the
logic for the <exemplum> template in tagdocs.xsl would need to change.
* exempla that are clearly in English are marked xml:lang="en". For
example, the one for <lg> at
http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-lg.html .
Exempla are also marked "en" if they contain non-English text but the
primary framework or explanation is in English. For example, the one for
<additions>, which has quotations in Old Norse and Latin prefaced by an
explanation in English.
* multilingual exampla are marked xml:lang="mul". This includes exempla
that are truly multilingual, for example the one for <body> (Latin + Old
English), but also ones where the example is taken from a language other
than the contextual language, as in the one for <caesura>, whose text is
in Old English. (In the latter case, one can add xml:lang="ang" to the
<eg:egXML> child of <exemplum>.) In most cases, translations of these
in a Western European context will be unnecessary.
* exempla that are not in a natural language (apart from element and
attribute names) are marked xml:lang="und" [the ISO 639-2 code for
'undetermined']. Computer code, feature structure data, etc., fall in
this category. The exemplum for <geo> is a type case:
<geo>41.687142 -74.870109</geo>
Decisions are inescapably subjective. For example, is the first exemplum
at
http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-front.html
"multilingual" because it is in English/Greek/Latin/Italian, or
"English" because it is from T.S. Eliot's "Waste Land"?
An <exemplum xml:lang="und"> should not need to be translated.
Multilingual exempla in the Guidelines, on the other hand, are mostly in
Western European languages, so non-Western translators will often want
to supply their own substitutes (as the Chinese translator has in fact
done in most cases like this).
The rationale behind all this is that exemplum/@xml:lang expresses the
"working language" of the example, to use the term Laurent pointed out
from ISO 16642. That is what will be relevant to translators and to
choices about what to display in the context of a given documentation
language.
David
--
David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager
ROTUNDA, The University of Virginia Press
PO Box 801079, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4318 USA
Courier: 310 Old Ivy Way, Suite 302, Charlottesville VA 22903
Email: dsewell at virginia.edu Tel: +1 434 924 9973
Web: http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/
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