Subject: RE: Translations of standards (was: RE: ASCII art)

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 11:16:35 -0800

I think that a better case to make wrt internationalization is that it
is hard to see how a pure ASCII  document is ever going to provide a
satisfactory description of a protocol that is based on unicode.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On 
> Behalf Of John C Klensin
> Sent: Monday, November 21, 2005 1:52 PM
> To: [email-masked]
> Cc: 'JFC \(Jefsey\) Morfin'; 'Paul Hoffman'; [email-masked]
> Subject: Translations of standards (was: RE: ASCII art)
> 
> --On Monday, 21 November, 2005 10:11 -0800 Thomas Gal 
> <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> >> I understand this. But it restricts RFC to the sole English
> >> (ASCII) language.
> >> Translating RFC as an authoritative text is therefore 
> impossible. jfc
> > 
> > 	Well there's a reason pilots and sailors and other 
> people  who's 
> >business is truly international use english. We can't  legitamately 
> >expect technical issues to be drafted in every  language 
> (just like we 
> >can't expect pilots to all know 5
> > languages) either. While I believe in the cultural and  
> intellectual 
> >value of different languages in exposing  different 
> viewpoints and ways 
> >of thinking I don't believe  there's anything technically 
> oriented that 
> >*can't* be  expressed in english as well as any other 
> language. It just 
> >so ...
> > Nor
> > do I have the personal motivation to translate a technical  
> document 
> >to hungarian or spanish though I could, because,  fluent or 
> not, that's 
> >still REALLY hard and depending in any  way on being technically 
> >colloquial in many languages, and  doing a good job at it.
> > 	That's not to say that anyone won't welcome translations of  
> >important documents, but perhaps that's a much better job 
> for  the UN 
> >then the IETF.
> 
> Tom, let me take this a step further.  Almost every other 
> international standards body, ISO and ITU included, end up 
> with an authoritative version in one language for technical 
> standards and then with translations that are considered less 
> authoritative.  I.e., if the translation disagrees with the 
> original authoritative version, the latter controls -- there 
> is no battle among translations as to which version is the 
> most accurate.  Even then, the best of the translations are 
> validated by the well-known, but difficult, time-consuming, 
> and expensive, process of having independent parties prepare 
> back translations to the original language, followed by a 
> careful technical
> comparison of the two.   For the most technical standards,
> translation is typically waived because it is generally 
> assumed that, if one is going to get conformance and 
> interoperability --and be sure one knows what that means-- 
> then there had best be only one version, rather than 
> standardized interpretations of it.
> 
> And the belief that any of this really has anything to do 
> with whether the base document is expressed in ASCII or not, 
> or whether its figures use ASCII artwork or images in some 
> conventional or standard form, is, to be polite, a stretch:
> remember that ASCII is inadequate to express all of English 
> accurately.  To use your example because it is handy, while 
> more characters than those in ASCII are needed to properly 
> write Spanish or Hungarian (as with English), one cannot 
> write any of the three, or French, without those characters.  
> Things would get much more interesting with Chinese, 
> Japanese, or Arabic, but, again, the form in which figures 
> are expressed is the least of the issues.
> 
>    john
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ietf mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
> 
> 

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 14:49:29 -0500

--On Monday, 21 November, 2005 11:16 -0800 "Hallam-Baker,
Phillip" <[email-masked]> wrote:

> I think that a better case to make wrt internationalization is
> that it is hard to see how a pure ASCII  document is ever
> going to provide a satisfactory description of a protocol that
> is based on unicode.

This is an entirely different issue from the one that I think
Jefsey was raising and Tom was responding to.  Conflating them
gets us nowhere at all.

With regard to the "protocol based on Unicode" issue, first, the
IETF has very little experience so far with such protocols.
"Based on Unicode", to me, is a different situation from "being
able to transmit Unicode".  The latter can be easily described
in a pure ASCII document, even though illustrative examples "in
Unicode" might make things more clear.   The comments below
could, in principle, change as IETF experience accumulates
although, personally, I'd be a little surprised. 

Suppose one had a protocol that was actually "based on Unicode".
Issues with look-alike characters, font variations, and
variations in coding and compression (normalization issues,
UTF-8 versus UTC-2 versus UTC-4 and potentially other
variations), etc., would nearly force characters to be
identified in code point terms, e.g., as U+NNNN, rather than, or
in addition to, just showing the characters in some preferred
font.  It is worth noting that the textual parts of the Unicode
standard itself are written in just that way.  So, again, the
non-ASCII text becomes an extremely useful illustration of what
is going on or part of illustrative examples or tables.  The
text may be easier to follow if those illustrations are present
than if it is not, but everything normative can still be
expressed in ASCII.  

And that takes us back to Paul's original comment, at least as I
understood it -- the important thing is the quality of the
writing.  Access to fancy formatting and presentation tools may
make good writing easier to follow and, in particular, to let
the reader get the gist of what is going on before trying to
deeply study the text.  But adding fancy formatting and
presentation to poor writing will, at best, only hide, for a
while, the fact that the explanations are inadequate.  And, by
not forcing the extra discipline that writing without a
dependence on clever illustrations requires, it may make it more
likely that we will get documents whose inadequacies are harder
to detect.

As I said, that conclusion could change as experience with
"protocols based on Unicode" expands.  But, so far, we have
almost no experience along that dimension (and, incidentally,
neither do ISO or ITU or IEEE, at least as far as I know).

    john

---

From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 02:08:21 +0100

>Jefsey was raising and Tom was responding to.  Conflating them

I commented Paul Hoffman's response to Julien Maisoneuve about "why 
we are so exceptional". Nothing else. May be should I have changed 
the subject. This is now done.

>while, the fact that the explanations are inadequate.

Agreed.

But I hope you do not imply non-ASCII English is fancy formatting and 
goes with inadequate explanations.

>And, by not forcing the extra discipline that writing without a

ASCII Draft is not the main point here. But it is true that a good 
draft often speaks more than long texts.

>neither do ISO or ITU or IEEE, at least as far as I know).

I have no idea of what are "protocols based on Unicode". I only know 
that equal linguistic opportunity and common global interest mean 
that authoritative protocols and procedures should be producible in 
every language and aggregated into the IETF document body. Not fully 
permitting this would only increase the risks of balkanization of the Internet.
jfc