Subject: RE: I-D file formats and internationalization

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 10:43:22 -0800

> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On 
> Behalf Of Robert Sayre
> 
> Unicode support is a different matter. I find the current 
> IETF policy to be incredibly bigoted. Many RFCs and I-Ds are 
> currently forced to misspell the names of authors and 
> contributors, which doesn't seem like correct attribution to 
> me. So, I recommend that the IETF secretariat and the RFC 
> Editor change their policies to allow UTF-8 text files. That 
> way, older RFCs and I-Ds produced using the current tools 
> would follow the same encoding.
> 
> I'm sure someone has already suggested this approach, but 
> I'll add my voice to the chorus.

It might seem odd to people whose names do fit in ASCII but there are a
lot of people who care about this type of issue.

In effect the message is sent out 'you do not really belong here', 'you
are a second class citizen', 'the IETF is an American organization and
the only people who really matter are going to be American'.

The fact that Brian is English and lives in Zurich is irrelevant. People
take their names very seriously and personally. It's a question of
outreach. Having one meeting out of three held outside North America
each year is not outreach, it is a holiday.

I am currently at the W3C AC meeting. They are also involved in the
ongoing 'internet governance' discussions but the W3C is involved a
participant in the discussions while the IETF is one of the topics of
the discussions. Needless to say it is better to be a participant than
the topic. The W3C has avoided concern by being conspicuously
international in its approach. The IETF has had the attitude 'this is
the way we do things here, nobody asked you to like it'.

So far 700 translations of W3C specifications have been made by
volunteers. I don't know what the quality of the translations are, I
would certainly be upset if one of my engineers used a translation as
the basis for writing running code. But those translations are certainly
used by academics to teach comp-sci courses in those languages and a
large number of students who would have found it difficult to understand
the material in translation have come to understand and use the
specification.

It is simply a fact of modern life that the ability to speak English
well is an essential qualification for almost all forms of knowledge
work, particularly at the research and elite levels. That does not mean
that a group of mostly English speakers should also make good English an
essential qualification at the apprentice and journeyman stages of
learning the craft.

		Phill

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From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 19:55:56 +0100

Phillip:
> the topic.

"The only thing worse than being talked about is NOT being talked about."
  -- Oscar Wilde

> volunteers.

Yes, VOLUNTEERS!  Nobody is stopping anyone from translating the RFCs.
I'd have to bet it's been done in quite a few cases.

Eliot

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From: Mark Baugher <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 11:05:44 -0800

For that matter, most Americans don't speak English

Mark

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From: Jeroen Massar <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 20:10:38 +0100

Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
<SNIP previous posters text>
> lot of people who care about this type of issue.

You can of course publish drafts and RFC's as XML which supports any
character set you want.

<SNIP>
> The IETF has had the attitude 'this is

It would be better to state: "if you don't like it, participate".
Because if you didn't participate, then don't complain that it isn't
like you wanted it to be. Yes that requires significant effort, time and
thus cash, but that is mostly unavoidable.

> So far 700 translations of W3C specifications have been made by
<SNIP>

One can always start translating RFC's: 4267 RFC's and a long list of
drafts to go, though there is a lot of material already translated by
book authors. Note that many languages don't have translations for many
English words. German is one of the good examples where they have a lot
of German versions of English words, but they don't have one for 'Hyper
Text Transfer Protocol' unless you babelfish it to "Hyper
Text-Übergangsprotokoll"*, which is far from a useful translation. There
is also the thing that sentence construction might cause
misinterpretation from what the original working group meant. SHOULD and
MUST both translate to Muß in German, which is thus not correct either.
This can cause many issues.
And German is somewhat in the same line as English, I am not even
thinking in the area of Asian languages, which I unfortunately am far
from familiar with except that they resemble small pictures of what they
mean.

I don't think it is a task for the IETF itself to translate documents.
But it would indeed be nice to have a place for them, with a big note
that they have not been verified and may include odd translations. Maybe
there could be a separate 'translated documents' section?

Greets,
 Jeroen

* contains a U-umlaut (&Uuml;) and Ringel-S (&szlig;)