RE: Translations in PWP?

Hi Nick,

The moment I read the first paragraph of your email something from the distant past came to mind when “War and Peace” was on my mandatory school reading list. Reading the original novel (which was published exactly as written by the author) was a huge pain, mainly because the high class Russian society of that time preferred to speak French, and the book was written as reflection of the real life – all descriptive parts are written in Russian, all dialogs are in French! For those who don’t speak French, a paper edition of the book had half a page footnote offered by the editorial staff to provide the translation of the dialog – and it is repeated page after page after page, for all four fat volumes of the novel.

So, I think we can safely consider “War and Peace” a glaring example of the use case, if anyone ever attempts to publish it as PWP preserving the original text as Leo Tolstoy intended.

Thanks,
Vlad


From: Nick Ruffilo [mailto:nickruffilo@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 09, 2016 9:45 AM
To: DPUB mailing list (public-digipub-ig@w3.org)
Subject: Translations in PWP?

Dear DPUB Group,

I had one of those things where the brain feels warm - I think they call it a thought...

Would there be a use-case for being able to have multiple translations of a text within a single container?  For example, if I had a copy of Tom Sawyer in English, French, German, etc, it could all be in one package, and I'd be able to toggle between them?  At least being able to go to the same chapter (or a given location) and switching between languages might be extremely useful.

I imagine in STEM type stuff this might be huge - allowing for an educational research paper to be shared in multiple languages - or maybe that's a bad thing, who knows.

I can imagine a bunch of really fun things one could do with such functionality as well (imagine a "dimension hopping sci-fi that you have to switch 'languages' to get to the end of the book - some translations move you forward, while others move you back' but that's not a use case I'd push as a reason for such functionality.

--
- Nick Ruffilo
@NickRuffilo
Aer.io<http://Aer.io> an INGRAM company