Re: acronym/abbr expansion

aloha, alexander!

i concur with martin's suggested code

<acronym xml:lang='en' title="Extensible HyperText Markup 
Language">XHTML</acronym> (Rashiryayemiy yazik razmetky giperteksta)

since the acronyms for which you seek to provide an expansion are 
themselves english, and will presumably be rendered in a latin font, it 
makes sense to provide the expansion in english as well, especially if you 
use martin's suggested code, which defines the natural language of the 
acronym as english!

the only possible addition would be an explicit expression of the 
relationship between the russian expansion of the acronym and the acronym 
itself -- such as is provided for form controls via the id/for relationship 
and the LABEL element..  moreover, use of the id/for binding would allow 
for the reuse of homophonic/homographic acronyms in a single document, such 
as "ADA", signifying the "American Dental Association" as well as the 
"Americans with Disabilities Act") -- the goal, from an accessibility, as 
well as a usability standpoint, is to ensure that there is explicit and 
unequivocal binding between the item-being-expanded and its expansion, not 
only so that assistive technology can automatically recognize the binding 
and adjust its rendering, but so that those who are visually processing the 
document can ascertain that an expansion exists -- mozilla, for example, 
provides visual cues wherever expansions are available, so that users know 
to query the text-string (usually via MouseOver) in order to obtain the 
expansion...  a more explicit binding between the acronym and its 
translated equivalent, therefore, would be of great utility to a screen 
magnification program, which could then allow the user to toggle between 
display of the english expansion, the russian expansion, and the acronym or 
to have all or any combination of the 3 simultaneously displayed -- 
something which would also benefit some users with certain cognitive 
processing problems, as well

actually, since you seem to be using XML or XHTML, you could define a block 
level element analogous to the "abbr" property defined for table headers, 
so that long strings of text can be annotated with an  acronyms or 
abbreviation, as follows:

<acronym xml:lang='en' title="Extensible HyperText Markup 
Language">XHTML</acronym> (<foo title="RYRG">Rashiryayemiy yazik razmetky 
giperteksta</foo>)

or you could extend acronym and abbr to include an id/for relationship...

in any event, the basic concept, as articulated by martin is a solution 
that very urgently needs to be codified somewhere, perhaps the W3C process 
document governing the requirements for documents or as part of the 
stipulations listed at:
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Translation/#Volunteer
as well as DOCUMENTED in _ALL_ translations in which it is employed (e.g. 
"In this translation, all acronyms are expanded using markup in English. An 
expansion of the acronym in [your-language-here] immediately follows the 
first instance of the acronym." )

has this issue been discussed on the w3c translators' emailing list, 
w3c-translators@w3.org, the archives of which live at:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-translators/

oh, and a pre-PS: isn't this the type of thread that should (also?) be 
conducted on wai-xtech?
gregory.

At 02:53 PM 4/13/02 +0400, you wrote:
>Hello everyone,
>
>I'm translating XHTML Basic 1.0 into Russian
>
>Take a look at the following fragment please:
>
>      <acronym title="Extensible HyperText Markup Language">XHTML</acronym>
>
>becomes
>
>        <acronym title="Rashiryayemiy yazik razmetky 
> giperteksta">XHTML</acronym>
>
>Do I have to indicate the xml:lang of the latest acronym as "en"
>(The html xml:lang attribute is "ru")?
>
>Is it correct to translate the title without the acronym itself?
>
>Other examples include various acronyms and abbreviations like
>"W3C", "PDF", "Co.", "Inc.", "Ltd.", "DTD", "WAP", "WML", "SGML" etc.
>
>Martin Duerst suggested that I don't translate the acronym titles and
>that I and add the text in Russian after the acronym:
> > For example
> > <acronym xml:lang='en' title="Extensible HyperText Markup 
> Language">XHTML</acronym> (Rashiryayemiy yazik razmetky giperteksta)
> > or
> > XHTML (Rashiryayemiy yazik razmetky giperteksta)
> > (and maybe add the text only the first time, but some WAI
> > experts may know better)
>
>Looking forward to hearing from you.
>
>Best wishes.
>---
>   Alexander "Croll" Savenkov         http://www.thecroll.com/
>   w3@hotbox.ru                            http://croll.da.ru/

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Received on Tuesday, 16 April 2002 20:13:28 UTC