Subject: RE: Why are we so exceptional [was: Translations of standards (was: RE: ASCII art)]

From: "Burger, Eric" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 13:59:30 -0500

Wouldn't having quasi-authoritative translations *result* in
balkanization?  The Chinese National Standard series comes immediately
to mind of authoritative translations *with interpretations*.

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of
JFC (Jefsey) Morfin
Sent: Monday, November 21, 2005 8:08 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Why are we so exceptional [was: Translations of standards (was:
RE: ASCII art)]

At 20:49 21/11/2005, John C Klensin wrote:
>--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.

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.

>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.

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
>dependence on clever illustrations requires, it may make it more
>likely that we will get documents whose inadequacies are harder
>to detect.

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

>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).

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

_______________________________________________
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: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 01 Dec 2005 01:26:05 +0100

At 19:59 30/11/2005, Burger, Eric wrote:
>Wouldn't having quasi-authoritative translations *result* in balkanization?

No. The current system leads to balkanization:
- exclusively ASCII standards call for translation. Since there is no 
possible cross-verification, the understanding may diverge.
- the local practices stay unknown to the IETF.

We need to build bridges, not to exclude, and to permit 
cross-verification. The first step is to have a common naming of the 
common references. Only bi-lingual people will be able to 
cross-verify, but we only need three of them to have a reasonably 
cross-verification of the texts and of the auditors. IRI-tags can 
permit that. Today an RFC cannot even quote a non-English reference.

The next step is to be able to integrate in the IETF authoritative 
BCPs, quotes of locally authoritative rules. Not to change them. We 
must not translate the normative quote (a translation should always 
be informative). This calls for the support of UTF-8. Otherwise the 
IETF creates the balkanization it wants to avoid (it cuts itself from 
the rest of the world).

>The Chinese National Standard series comes immediately to mind of 
>authoritative translations *with interpretations*.

I note that the best protection against interpretations is 
multilingualism. If you have a version in English and a version in 
Chinese, it is difficult to say which is to be used as a reference 
(as Vint says, is authoritative the most accepted understanding - a 
basic brainware rule) - so the Chinese standard will soon be the 
referent. But if you have a version in French, in German, in Russian, 
in Arabic, etc. and only one says something different, common sense 
will prevail (and we will be able to analyse why, what may lead to 
new developments).

>nal Message-----