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/