RE: New article for REVIEW: Working with composite messages

Hello Richard,

Some small comments: An example is not consistent ("The ... has been 
enabled." vs. "The ... has been disabled.").

"... improve message consistency, and optimize memory.": I'd
put at least a 'may' before "optimize memory". This is way less
of an issue than a few years ago.

" If the alternative string stapler options were used at runtime, the word 
has would be incorrect": No need to use conditional; the example
as shown beforehand suggests that "stapler options" is actually
being used.

"However, since there is now only a single string containing the word has, 
it cannot be translated in more than one way.": Difficult to understand:
no need to translate, because the problem exists already in English.
This problem is reinforced by the start of the next paragraph, which
brings up other languages, and therefore suggests that the sentence
in question is really only about English. It seems that in these two
paragraphs, two different issues (the problem already being there
in English, and the problem of translation) have been mixed too
much. I suggest cleaning things up by first only talking about
English, and then talking about other languages, translations,...

As for the question below, I clearly think 'topic' is better than
'subject', but I'm not happy with 'predicate' as well as with
'comment'. Unfortunately, I don't have a better suggestion (yet).

Regards,   Martin.

At 02:43 06/03/25, Richard Ishida wrote:
 >
 >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 Monday, 27 March 2006 06:52:15 UTC