Re: German XML Translation - first Draft

At 18:07 98/03/20 +0100, Stefan Mintert wrote:

> I'm pleased to announce the first DRAFT of our German translation of XML 1.0.
> It is available at 
> 
>   http://www.mintert.com/xml/trans/REC-xml-19980210-de.html
> 
> 
> At the moment there's no link to this file; if you can read German
> (Martin?) please take a look at the legal notes at the top of the page. 
> If everything is fine I will announce the draft translation in some German 
> language newsgroups for review.

Please do so. Please note that you don't have to ask permission here
to announce it. You just have to anounce here that it is finished
(or whatever) and went up.

It's your responsibility to make sure you correspond to the requirements.
I happen to read German, of course, but I don't think we have somebody
here who reads Indonesian, but we have some volunteers for an Indonesian
translation of HTML 4.0.

If we (or anybody else) finds out that somehow, you don't conform, then
we will tell you, and you will have to change it as soon as possible.


A few points nevertheless:

The example at http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/translation-example.html
manages to have a different background for the additions made due to the
translation. I would suggest that you do the same.


In http://www.mintert.com/xml/trans/REC-xml-19980210-de.html#2.12

>  <p xml:lang="de-DE">Ich hab' dich gern.</p>
>  <p xml:lang="de-CH">Ch'ha di g舐n.</p>

(My Japanese setup may have distorted the Umlauts a bit.)

This is a very cute example, and as a Swiss I very much appreciate
it, but it's probably wrong :-(. The problem lies in the question of
what de-CH exactly refers to. Does it refer to the Swiss variant
of standard German, which has differences to the German version
of standard German to a similar extent maybe as American and
British English are different, or does it refer to the Swiss
dialects of German (which are about as different from standard
German as Dutch)?

The example above assumes the later. But general use on computers
assumes the former. "de-CH" is routinely used for Swiss locales on
computers, which besides a different keyboard,... may include different
spell-checkers that don't use the sharp "s", and allow such differences
as "parkieren" instead of "parken". Similarly, in an Austrian version
("de-AU"), words such as Ja"nner instead of Januar and Marille instead
of Aprikose would be used. But not many differences otherwise.
This distinction is probably much more useful, because there is much
more text in the Swiss variant of Standard German than in any of
the many Swiss dialects, and because if "de-CH" referred to the
Swiss dialects, to which one would it refer, and in what orthography?
That's not a problem for the Swiss variant of standard German, which
is well defined by Duden.


> Diese deutsche ワbersetzung ist unter 
> http://www.mintert.com/xml/trans/REC-xml-19980210-de.html
> sowie unter !!!hier die W3C-Adresse!!! zu finden. Weitere
              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> Teile der XML-ワbersetzung sind (jetzt oder in Zukunft) unter
> http://www.mintert.com/xml/trans/ zu finden.


Above, you say "!!!here the W3C Address!!!". For the reasons I
explained earlier about the impossibility to use anything like
"original translation", the W3C currently (and most probably in
the future) also doesn't plan to put translations on its web
site. What we will indeed do, but what will still need a bit
more of work in the case of XML, is that we will reference your
translation.


With kind regards,   Martin.




Regards,   Martin.

Received on Thursday, 26 March 1998 07:25:27 UTC