Re: multilingual braille question

On Fri, 13 Nov 1998 14:47:50 +1100 (EST), 
Charles McCathieNevile   <charlesn@srl.rmit.EDU.AU> wrote:

>Is there anyone out there who can tell me whether I have this right?
>
>As I understand it braille is usually abbreviated, and that there are 
>different conventions for abbreviation depending on the language. In 
>other words there is French braille and German braille. If this is the 
>case, is there a poassibility that a sentence written in one language and 
>contracted will appear to be logical in another language, but have a 
>different meaning. And if so, will this occur more than once in any 
>person's lifetime?
>

Joe Sullivan's reply is good, since he has made a career out 
of writing braille translation software.  There is some 
probability of confusability for short sentences, but people can 
figure out what is going on.  Also, I wouldn't expect much contracted 
braille to be encoded as HTML.  Rather, when people talk about Braille 
presentation, my understanding is that they are dealing with 
uncontracted, otherwise printable, text in the language of interest, 
with an eye toward contracting and rendering it "on the fly", or 
making hard copy from downloaded HTML/CSS  files.  

In the WebBraille project here at NLS, we provide contracted braille 
material from a website, but it is not HTML.  Rather, it is ready for 
embossing on braille devices at 25 lines per page, 38 to 40 characters 
per line.  


-- Lloyd Rasmussen
Senior Staff Engineer, Engineering Section
National Library Service for the  Blind and Physically Handicapped
Library of Congress          202-707-0535
(work)       lras@loc.gov    http://www.loc.gov/nls/
(home) lras@sprynet.com http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/lras/

Received on Friday, 13 November 1998 10:44:28 UTC