Re: I18N-ISSUE-217: Missing support for localizable items that are not translatable [ITS-20]

On Jan 18, 2013, at 1:35 , Felix Sasaki wrote:

> Am 18.01.13 10:29, schrieb Norbert Lindenberg:
>> On Jan 18, 2013, at 1:06 , Felix Sasaki wrote:
>> 
>>> Am 18.01.13 01:35, schrieb Internationalization Working Group Issue Tracker:
>>>> I18N-ISSUE-217: Missing support for localizable items that are not translatable [ITS-20]
>>>> 
>>>> http://www.w3.org/International/track/issues/217
>>>> 
>>>> Raised by: Norbert Lindenberg
>>>> On product: ITS-20
>>>> 
>>>> ITS 2.0 is missing support for marking up items that are localizable but not translatable.
>>>> Translatable items can easily be identified with the "translate" attribute; there's no equivalent attribute "localize".
>>> There is no need for an equivalent. It is a design principle for ITS1 and ITS2 that the data categories are distinct items and that an application can combine them freely, see above.
>> Except that the combination above doesn't fully express "localizable".
> 
> Why can't you interpret "translatabe" as "localizable" in the combination and in your envisaged application? What other application would be disturbed by that interpretation?

As I said in the original comment, and Des has explained in more detail, you want to keep non-translatable but localizable items separate from translatable ones because they can't be handled in the normal translation process. Large companies commonly spend millions of dollars or euros a year on translation and therefore work hard to make that process as efficient as possible. In the end, translators get paid cents per word. You can't feed image URLs, date format patterns, CSS color identifiers, or UI element coordinates into that process and hope that translators will realize what they are, learn the appropriate syntax, and provide the correct localization. They have to keep going translating words. The other localizable data, which usually is a small fraction of the total volume, gets handled by localization engineers.

Norbert

Received on Saturday, 19 January 2013 06:51:28 UTC