[tei-council] contact for i18n work

[Gabriel Bodard]

I agree this is a good suggestion, but I would go further. What I think 
I meant to suggest (and this may not actually require any expense) is 
that we be more proactive in encouraging/commissioning translations. We 
as Council may not have any Bengali or Chinese speakers among us 
(although we do have French, Italian, Greek and Russian speakers) but 
I'm sure between us and other active members of the community we know some.

For example, even the Tagore scholars who don't currently use TEI could, 
I am sure, be persuaded to furnish us with some instances of the sorts 
of things that we want to mark up in examples in the Guidelines, so that 
they could be made available alongside the English examples. (And if in 
the process they give us examples of things that the TEI could do 
better: bingo!) A wealth of Spanish examples would I bet be even easier 
to come up with.

(In fact I know someone who is marking up a text in mediaeval Greek, 
Russian, Bulgarian, Italian, Arabic [as well as English and French] 
translations as we speak. Should we dig out a few examples from them?)

My point is, if we made it a priority to collect a few more examples 
that are not in English, would that help to show we're not entirely 
monoglot and imperialist? (By precisely being a bit less monoglot and 
imperialist.) Advertising our work with/interest in Omegat couldn't hurt 
either.

I know this means more work, and we're already short-handed for 
everything we'd like to do. I'd be willing to throw a bit of work in 
this direction.

G

On 12/05/2013 20:32, Kevin Hawkins wrote:
> On 5/12/13 2:52 PM, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
>> So we can dig a hole and fill it with water, but we can't _make_ the Bengali
>> horse drink. There's a chicken and egg thing here - if Tagore scholars
>> don't use TEI cos they think it can't represent what they need to express,
>> and so don't supply examples or solutions, then the TEI will never be
>> suited to Tagore studies....
>
> I agree.  I suggest that a quick way to get out of the chicken-and-egg
> problem is to advertise contact information on
> http://www.tei-c.org/Tools/I18N/ for anyone interested in contributing
> to the effort.
>
> Once we do that, I'll also add a section on i18n at
> http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/participation.xml .
>

-- 
Dr Gabriel BODARD
Researcher in Digital Epigraphy

Department of Digital Humanities
King's College London
26-29 Drury Lane
London WC2B 5RL

E: gabriel.bodard at kcl.ac.uk
T: +44 (0)20 7848 1388

http://www.digitalclassicist.org/
http://www.currentepigraphy.org/