Re: Multilingual labels in a w3.org/ns vocabulary

Hi Phil,
There are people on the list who can comment better on the usefulness of 
multilingual labels, however I'm interested to note that  the ttl also 
has the comments translated.

Is this done with the aim of supporting the translation of the vocab 
spec overall? If I'm looking at the right document 
(http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-org ?), I didn't see a strong correspondence 
between the comments for classes and properties and the text in the 
specification, so perhaps this isn't the intention? My instinct is that 
even if only developers really read the spec, user in different 
languages will definitely need to refer to some class/property 
definition text as  well as the label to make direct use of the vocabulary.

Coincidently,  I'd recently  talked to Coralie Mercier and Bert Bos 
about supporting multi-linguality in the W3C via machine translation, 
both for real-time IRC translation and perhaps the existing 
crowd-sourced translation effort for specs. My suggestion, along the 
lines of the use case we outlined at: 
http://www.w3.org/community/bpmlod/wiki/Use_cases_definition#Localization_Workflow 

to use PROV-O to track translation projects and harvest MT training 
corpora from them sparked some 'eating our own dogfood' interest.

As the org vocab clearly has some active translators already, this might 
be an interesting use case, combining both vocab label and specification 
content translation.

cheers,
Dave


On 23/09/2013 14:47, Phil Archer wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> As Marios and Boris know, because they've been directly involved, the 
> GLD WG is about to update the namespace file [1] for one of its 
> vocabularies [2]. Within the next day or so it will be available with 
> labels and comments in en, fr, el and es. Labels will also be 
> available in Arabic.
>
> Once it's in place I plan to write a blog post about it and generally 
> make a fuss about a W3C vocab being available in more languages and 
> how we'd like to see this extended. Currently only ORG 
> (http://www.w3.org/ns/org.ttl) has multilingual labels - namely 
> English and French.
>
> What I want to then find out is whether this is actually helpful or 
> not? In theory of course it's good that a vocab's labels will be 
> multilingual, but what might the practical impact be? Moreover... how 
> the heck can we know?
>
> A question arises about the maintainability. The people who have 
> provided the translated labels are people we trust implicitly. But I'd 
> really like to say to the world "if you would like to provide 
> translations in another language, please do and I'll add it." Safe? 
> Wise? Laying W3C open to abuse?
>
> I'd be interested in this group's comments
>
> Thank you
>
> Phil
> (Embarrassed to be monoglot).
>
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/ns/dcat.ttl
> [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat/
>

Received on Tuesday, 24 September 2013 23:02:04 UTC