Language translation in e-mail standards

I have been thinking many times on how to best support
language translation in e-mail standards. We have now
received a research grant, which will allow us to
implement this next year.

Some requirements on a language translation standard:

(1) It should cater for both machine and human translations.

(2) It should cater for more than one translation of the
     same message, usually first a machine translation and
     later on a human translation of the same message.

(3) It should cater for both the case where all language
     versions are sent at the same time, and when one
     language version is sent first and the translations
     are sent later.

(4) It should cater for sending a message to a human
     or machine for translation, with information on
     where to forward it after translation.

(5) It should cater for people to indicate that they
     can read more than one language, and to indicate
     preferences, like in HTTP where you can specify
     Accept-Language: da, en-gb;q=0.8, en;q=0.7.
     It should users to specify that they want
     for example the original language for French
     and English, and that they prefer a German
     original to a machine-translation to English,
     but prefer the English translation if it was
     made by a human.

(6) It should gracefully degrade its functionality
     to old mailers not using the standard.

Any comments on these requirements? Anything missing?
-- 
Jacob Palme <jpalme@dsv.su.se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/jpalme/

Received on Sunday, 12 November 2000 15:01:09 UTC