RE: simple language testable thing

Lisa Seeman: 
	Hear is an obvious and useful one (especially for non English sites)
	 
	Provide translations for any text not written in the natural
language of the page 


Yvette:

Yikes! That would be amazingly difficult in languages such as Dutch that use
a _lot_ of foreign words. See the article I wrote about examples of language
changes in websites:
available at http://www.heritas.nl/wcag/language.html

What _is_ a foreign word? Take the examples:
1. A word that has been in the language for so long it can be found in all
the dictionaries ('manager' in Dutch)
2. A word that has been in the language for a while, and can be found in the
extended version of a dictionary, but not in the pocket editions ('award' in
Dutch)
3. A mixed word like 'shoppen' where a foreign word (shop) has been made
into a verb in the native language ('shoppen' in Dutch), and isn't in any
dictionary. 
4. A word or phrase that is used from the foreign language ('quick links')

In my opinion, examples 2 and 4 can be called foreign and would need
translations according to Lisa's suggested guideline. But it's a grey area,
you can just as easily argue that example 2 isn't foreign anymore. It's
definitely NOT simply applicable. 

If we require something like what Lisa suggested, we might have to make it
level 3 because it is asking quite a lot for a language like Dutch and would
prevent a lot of people from aspiring to reach level 2. 

Yvette Hoitink
CEO Heritas, Enschede, The Netherlands
E-mail: y.p.hoitink@heritas.nl

Received on Tuesday, 3 February 2004 05:26:38 UTC