Re: Accept-Language and W3C-Translations

thanks for your comments, björn.

Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> 
> This is btw. offtopic here, I suggest to reply to either the spec-prod
> or the w3c-translators mailing list.

thanks. i'm aware of both mentioned mailinglist. i posted to intl-list
because i believe it _is_ an issue of internationalization. of course my
question is not a technical question as - for example - character
encodings.

but if w3c is developing i18n techniques, it should (in my opinion)
furthermore try to reach as many people around the world as possible and
as good as possible; the latter is very much influenced by the language
in which a w3c text is available.

_therefore_ i think this list is the right one. 

if i'm wrong, please let me know!

> 
> You are free to publish an annotated version of the original document
> that incorporates such a note but it is not possible to include it in
> the specification itself, since you need to update the specification
> each time translation status changes.


i wasn't talking about _how_ to do it, and i think it's too early to
discuss this. but i think "not possible" is wrong. each spec is rendered
in a specific way. there are some stylesheets involved who add text and
graphics (i.e. logos). some specs are rendered from xml-sources by
xslt-programs.
so, what we see is not _the_ spec, is it? we see a particular view on
the spec. 

if it would be true what you say, we wouldn't be able to include the
current date+time in a web page; but we are. of course can we include
dynamic content in a static rendering of a web page. 

and a list of translations is already maintained. right now the
information about a translation is maintained at different places by
different people.

in our german translation project we finished a number of translations
in the past weeks. i had to contact at least five w3c team members to
give them the information about a new translation (a list of german
translations is maintained at the german w3c office; for each spec (or
WG) another person is responsible for a list of translations of this
particular spec (or WG)). btw: still not all of the available
translations are listed at the appropriate places (haven't checked
recently); i'm giving up...

a centralized approach would ease the job. one single list of
translations (or maybe one for each foreign language) in a simple
xml-format to attach some metadata (which spec, which language and so
on). it would be quite easy to produce a list of translations for any
foreign language. furthermore this list could be used when displaying a
spec: the Accept-Language header field is evaluated, the translations
list is checked for a corresponding translation and the spec will be
delivered to the client with the note "a translation in your language is
available".
that's all and it _is_ possible. no need to touch a spec.


bye, stefan

--
www.mintert.com
www.edition-w3c.de

Received on Wednesday, 9 October 2002 19:29:48 UTC