RE: New article for REVIEW: Working with composite messages

Folks,

I was about to write this note to John Cowan, but began having doubts.
Topic-comment doesn't sound too bad today, for some reason.  Let's just do a
sense check.  Who prefers subject-predicate, and who prefers topic-comment?

http://www.w3.org/International/articles/composite-messages/

I'm afraid to say, I'm leaning on the topic-comment side at the moment. I do
like 'topic', and I've always worried a little about 'predicate' - may sound
too technical for some.

What do you think?

RI







Hello John,

Thanks for your comment.

We discussed this during the GEO telecon this week and, while we agree that
linguistically-speaking topic is much better, we felt that in 'layman's
terms' we couldn't find a better suggestion than subject-predicate.  On the
other hand, we are not overly enthusiastic about that either.  

The upshot is that we will leave as is for now, but if someone comes up with
another solution or a persuasive argument, we may change it in the future.

Cheers,
RI


============
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/
http://www.w3.org/International/
http://people.w3.org/rishida/blog/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ishida/
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Cowan [mailto:cowan@ccil.org] 
> Sent: 16 February 2006 21:18
> To: Richard Ishida
> Cc: www-international@w3.org
> Subject: Re: New article for REVIEW: Working with composite messages
> 
> Richard Ishida scripsit:
> 
> > This article provides looks at design and development 
> practices that 
> > can cause major problems for translation. Designers must be very 
> > careful about how they split up and reuse text on-screen 
> because the 
> > linguistic differences between languages can lead to real headaches 
> > for localizers and may in some cases make a reasonable translation 
> > impossible to achieve.
> 
> I suggest that the "subject-predicate" terminology be 
> replaced by "topic-comment" terminology throughout.  The term 
> "subject" is already defined as "topic" in the text.  If the 
> term "comment" is thought confusing to developers, it could 
> be replaced by "claim" or "value".
> "Subject" and "predicate" are already highly overloaded in 
> subtly different senses from the way they are used here.
> 
> -- 
> Even a refrigerator can conform to the XML      John Cowan
> Infoset, as long as it has a door sticker       cowan@ccil.org
> saying "No information items inside".           http://www.ap.org
>         --Eve Maler                             
> http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
>

Received on Friday, 24 March 2006 17:44:18 UTC