Re: Multiligual Credentials

Hi Andres,

Thanks for the info about Velocity’s approach.

I think what the DCC will do in the new year, is write up some documentation that describe the VCDM, ELM (very similar to VCDM) and Open Badges approaches. There’s some other info and approaches in this list that could be helpful to include too. We’ll also plan how our verifier and wallet will accommodate the approaches.

From the DCC perspective, it would definitely be ideal to have a single approach that can be agreed upon. It’s possible that a newer version of Open Badges could shift in the direction of VCDM but in the meantime, we need to document all of the approaches so that apps and developers know what the options are right now (and for backwards compatibility).

It could be that some do decide to rely on AI as Manu mentioned, but as we discussed at the VC-EDU call, many education credentials need the multiple languages signed in the credentials and many countries automatically have two translations for their documents. So with that in mind, The DCC’s recommendation and plan is to provide as much info as possible and see where that takes us.

re: meeting time – I completely understand how frustrating that could be. I’m no longer a co-chair at VC-EDU so I can’t assist with this but maybe the co-chairs would be interested in exploring an additional meeting hosted by you at a more convenient time?

Thanks!

K.


--
Kerri Lemoie, PhD
Director, Digital Credentials Consortium
https://digitalcredentials.mit.edu/

she/her


From: Andres Olave <andres.olave@velocitycareerlabs.com>
Date: Monday, November 25, 2024 at 8:08 PM
To: Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>, Patrick St-Louis <patrick.st-louis@dtlab-labcn.org>
Cc: Kerri Lemoie <klemoie@mit.edu>, Benjamin Young <byoung@digitalbazaar.com>, public-vc-edu@w3.org <public-vc-edu@w3.org>, public-credentials@w3.org <public-credentials@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Multiligual Credentials
Hi all,

Kerrie - thanks for adding this work to the mailing list.

This is an area of interest for Velocity Network. The network has so far looked at two different approaches to multilingual credentials and currently advises issuers to use the VCDM approach, except when using open badges. It would be great if there were a single approach we can agree on!

This is a familiar refrain from me, but I'm wondering how we can make it easier for me to engage as I am based on the east coast of Australia.

Andres Olave
CTO
Velocity Career Labs

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On 26 Nov 2024 at 05:39 +1100, Patrick St-Louis <patrick.st-louis@dtlab-labcn.org>, wrote:

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<mailto:msporny@digitalbazaar.com>> wrote:
On Fri, Nov 22, 2024 at 3:27 PM Kerri Lemoie <klemoie@mit.edu<mailto: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/