Re: [Comment on jlreq WD]

Hello Rick,

thank you very much for your comments! Here is some feedback from Mr 
Anan, from Microsoft, participant in the taskforce:

I understand what he means and I wish if we could make our draft more 'English'. But the current draft was intentionally authored as such, not to generate confusions on similar concepts between Western and Japanese text layout. We'd be happy to reduce Japanese derived terms when we know we can safely replace with the corresponding English terms.


I agree with him, btw. We will come back with further replies to you later.

Felix


Rick Jelliffe さんは書きました:
>
> Congratulations on the new draft. It is looking very good, and is very 
> exciting.
>
> 1. May I suggest that s1.3 "Basic Principles for Development of this 
> Document" should have an additional numbered list item
>
> "i. It does not cover specific Japanese table and layout idioms."
>
> When I worked in the publishing industry in Japan, 20 years ago, and 
> when I worked in Taiwan 10 years ago researching Chinese typesetting 
> requirements (among other things), I was continually impressed by the 
> variety of CJK table forms: these will be of course familiar to the 
> CJK people on the Working Group. These forms spring out of the size 
> and uses of kanji in table headings, often. Westerners are universally 
> unaware of their existence, and often belittle them when they see 
> them. I believe they have never been formally standardized in CJK 
> countries either.
>
> Which means they are a common cultural artifact, highly suited for CJK 
> documents, developed in CJK areas, and widely popular in the days of 
> hand-layout of tables, which do not have good support by 
> Western-sourced technology. Internationalization to the rescue!
>
> I can understand if the I18n WG wants to prioritize composition in 
> this spec, but I suggest that this paragraph (above) would at least be 
> an acknowledgment that there are issues such as CJK tables that are 
> floating around.
>
> 2. I think you should adopt the editorial policy of using the English 
> phrase then the Japanese technical term as a suffix, for the English 
> version. For example "page content area (kihon hanmen)" rather than 
> "hihon hanmen (page content area)". And certainly never just "kihon 
> hanmen". The Japanese version can have the opposite. If the goal of 
> the English version is to make the ideas more available to 
> non-Japanese, that would be a better policy I think. Westerners do not 
> like flipping to indexes or lists (when I worked in Japan, one of the 
> tasks we had to do for moving Japanese texts to Western text was 
> moving index material to the main body more.) The current draft reads 
> almost like a lesson in Japanese rather than an explanation of 
> concepts, because of this, if you see what I mean.
>
> Cheers
> Rick Jelliffe
>
> (Formerly, invited expert, W3C I18n IG)
>

Received on Friday, 24 October 2008 13:49:56 UTC