[tei-council] TEI Guidelines display

[James Cummings]

On 30/10/12 09:52, Lou Burnard wrote:
> One of the smarter students here in Tours has just pointed out to me
> that although it's marvellous having the element spec descriptions
> displayed in French, it's really confusing to see the explanatory
> expansion of an English tag name given in French. For example, if you
> look up the spec for <lb> in the Guidelines in French you will see
>
> <lb>(saut de ligne) marque le début d'un ligne...
>
> This doesnt really explain to the enquiring mind why the tag is "lb"
> (rather than say "sl"_).
>
> It would be better if it said
>
> <lb>(i.e. line break : saut de ligne) marque le début d'un ligne...

Isn't this making the mistaken assumption that the TEI tag names 
are in English?  Admittedly they are often derived from English 
words, so maybe it would be better.

To play devil's advocate, I might point out that the gloss for 
<secFol> is "(second folio)" when the element name really derives 
from the term Secundo Folio and that is how it is referred to in 
the prose 
http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/MS.html#msmisc "The 
secFol element (for ‘secundo folio’) is used to record...".  This 
leads to the conclusion that the glosses are translated and so 
'saut de ligne' is correct. Are you suggesting that we should 
always prefix glosses with the English version or the 'native 
language from which the element name was derived' version? i.e. 
should it be:
(secundo folio: second folio)?

I admit that your student has a point and that it is only on a 
theoretical level that I can argue that say, <settlement> is a 
language-independent token and not an element whose name is in 
English.

-James

-- 
Dr James Cummings, researchsupport at it.ox.ac.uk
Research Support, IT Services, University of Oxford