- From: Masafumi NAKANE <max@wide.ad.jp>
- Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2003 13:06:31 +0900
- To: y.p.hoitink@heritas.nl
- Cc: thoeg@get2net.dk, w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
On Thu, 4 Dec 2003 14:15:57 +0100, "Yvette P. Hoitink" <y.p.hoitink@heritas.nl> wrote: > Marking up foreign sentences would fall into the 'must do' category for me, > whereas marking up occasional foreign words would be a 'should do' or even > just 'could do' depending on how easy it is to recognize the word when > pronounced in the main language of the text. "Sitemap", even when pronounced In general, I agree with this. I think this is true especially for Western languages. In East Asian languages, and when they are represented using Unicode, it is extremely important to identify the natural language in order for the speech/Braille output technologies to correctly render the content, since there are characters that are used, for example, both in Japanese and in Chinese, but of course pronounced differently. Now, when phrases originally came from Chinese are used in Japanese text, and if it is marked up as Chinese, then, probably majority of people would not understand it just by listening to it since Japanese know such phrases with Japanese way of reading them. This is also true for Chinese proper nouns. When they are read in Japanese, they are pronounced differently from how they are pronounced in Chinese, in most cases. But if it is something like textbook of Chinese language written for Japanese speakers, then it is probably essential to specify the language. So, I believe specifying the natural language of block of foreign text, like paragraph, is must, while foreign text of length shorter than that, like sentences/phrases/words/characters, is should. Cheers, Max
Received on Thursday, 4 December 2003 23:06:39 UTC