Re: Multiligual Credentials

On Fri, Nov 22, 2024 at 3:27 PM Kerri Lemoie <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/

Received on Saturday, 23 November 2024 17:20:52 UTC