Re: Multiligual Credentials

Greetings,

I want to point out that we (BCGov in collaboration with the Swiss
Government) have presented our OCA Render Method at IIW. We are planning to
present this at the ccg weekly sometime soon.

The OCA specification has a section about internationalization which might
be an interesting resource to contribute to this discussion. Here is the
link:
https://oca.colossi.network/guide/applications/#use-case-3-internationalisation-using-language-specific-overlays

Regards,
Patrick

On Sat, Nov 23, 2024 at 12:22 PM Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 22, 2024 at 3:27 PM Kerri Lemoie <klemoie@mit.edu> wrote:
> > I think it would be helpful in this thread to explore the pros and cons
> of each approach. For the time being, we have both. Maybe an exploration
> could result in an alignment or at least a doc that can inform developers
> of the differences.
>
> One other thing that's worth mentioning is that we did have a involved
> multi-year (9+ years? at this point) conversation with the
> Internationalization WG (through multiple horizontal reviews of the
> JSON-LD and then the VC spec) that resulted in these sections:
>
> https://w3c.github.io/vc-data-model/#names-and-descriptions
>
> and more specifically, this example:
>
>
> https://w3c.github.io/vc-data-model/#example-use-of-the-name-and-description-properties-0
>
> That's the best current practice, but we know some people don't like
> it. There is further guidance here:
>
> https://w3c.github.io/vc-data-model/#internationalization-considerations
>
> We do know that some people have proposed language maps, links to
> language translations, and other things, but we did not reach
> consensus on any of those approaches (that is, they're worse than
> what's linked to above per our discussion with the
> Internationalization folks). That said, their position tends to be
> that /any/ widely deployed internationalization approach is better
> than none.
>
> The other thing to consider is that having a developer and data
> modeller mark this stuff up vs. auto-translating using modern AI is
> probably an increasingly outmoded way to do language translation. Yes,
> it's not perfect, but it's cheap and scalable -- which is often not
> the case for language translation in general.
>
> Why not let the bots do the translations from the source language to
> the desired target language instead of trying to guess which languages
> would be the most important to an immigrant whom the data modeller or
> developer will never get exposed to?
>
> In any case, just some thoughts with no clear guidance other than to
> see if what we propose in the VC spec works for you (because at least
> that thing went through significant horizontal review by
> Internationalization experts in a global standards organization).
>
> -- manu
>
> --
> Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/
> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> https://www.digitalbazaar.com/
>
>