Re: Accept-Language and W3C-Translations

* Stefan Mintert wrote:
>> This is btw. offtopic here, I suggest to reply to either the spec-prod
>> or the w3c-translators mailing list.
>
>thanks. i'm aware of both mentioned mailinglist. i posted to intl-list
>because i believe it _is_ an issue of internationalization. of course my
>question is not a technical question as - for example - character
>encodings.
>
>but if w3c is developing i18n techniques, it should (in my opinion)
>furthermore try to reach as many people around the world as possible and
>as good as possible; the latter is very much influenced by the language
>in which a w3c text is available.

This list is meant for general proposals, clarifications and critique
that can further the internationalization of the Web, you provide
specific proposals on how W3C should publish it's technical reports, the
latter is covered by spec-prod and www-publications. But ok, be that as
it may.

>> You are free to publish an annotated version of the original document
>> that incorporates such a note but it is not possible to include it in
>> the specification itself, since you need to update the specification
>> each time translation status changes.
>
>i wasn't talking about _how_ to do it, and i think it's too early to
>discuss this. but i think "not possible" is wrong. each spec is rendered
>in a specific way. there are some stylesheets involved who add text and
>graphics (i.e. logos). some specs are rendered from xml-sources by
>xslt-programs.
>so, what we see is not _the_ spec, is it?

Sure it is, it's a publication principle that once published, resources
at a given dated URI in the /TR area do not change; the sequence of
octets returned by the web server should always be the same. If you want
a specification to know about it's available translations, you need to
change that and I just don't think this is likely to happen. Further,
people expect to get the normative version of a technical report if they
request something in the /TR area, I don't think it's a good idea to
actually change that, even if I sympathize with your proposal.

>if it would be true what you say, we wouldn't be able to include the
>current date+time in a web page; but we are. of course can we include
>dynamic content in a static rendering of a web page. 

Sure, it's not a technical problem, but a organizational and
sociological one.

>in our german translation project we finished a number of translations
>in the past weeks. i had to contact at least five w3c team members to
>give them the information about a new translation (a list of german
>translations is maintained at the german w3c office; for each spec (or
>WG) another person is responsible for a list of translations of this
>particular spec (or WG)). btw: still not all of the available
>translations are listed at the appropriate places (haven't checked
>recently); i'm giving up...

So you are complaining about translation list maintainers not doing
their job properly?

>a centralized approach would ease the job. one single list of
>translations (or maybe one for each foreign language) in a simple
>xml-format to attach some metadata (which spec, which language and so
>on). it would be quite easy to produce a list of translations for any
>foreign language.

Propose that on w3c-translators@w3.org.

Received on Wednesday, 9 October 2002 21:02:26 UTC