Thomas Beale wrote: > Tim Churches wrote: > >> >> Yes, I thought of examples which were similar to these. And it is not >> just a matter of the recording health professional not knowing what >> "Engelse ziekte" means, and thus having to record to verbatim and >> untranslated - many diagnoses have no equivalent in other >> languages/cultures, and are thus untranslatable (at least not without >> some information loss). >> > actually, these kinds of expressions are not the problem - they can > happily be recorded inside a DV_TEXT object which has the language set > to English or Dutch or whatever it may be; an inline occurrence of a > 'foreign' term that is routinely used by speakers of a different > language (the way we use 'gesundheit' or 'triage' in english) can be > assumed to be understood and is probably even in the dictionary of the > language of narration. > > The problem is when there are text fragments recorded where the words > are viable in more than one language, and do not usually have the same > meaning in each. Words in Danish & Norwegian should be almost the same, > but I assume there are by now some small differences; there are > certainly words in most of the European languages which occur in another > language, and are completely unrelated. So in theory a language marker > is needed to ensure that a later reader knows what language the words > were in (maybe even to allow them to know what kind of translator to > call). So the question remains - do we need the ability to have multiple > languages inside a single entry? For Gerard's examples - would it really > be necessary to indicate what the other languages were or not, given > that they are probably obvious to most users who will use them?
You might also consider the false-friend problem - when learning another language we optimistically expect words to mean the same as they do in our native tongue. FOr example I was surprised that "water" in Italian means W.C. not acqua! -- Gavin Brelstaff - BioMedical Area, CRS4 in Sardinia Loc. Pixina Manna Edificio 1, C.P. n.25, 09010 Pula (CA) Italy. Email: gjb at crs4.it Phone:+39.070.9250.312 Fax:+39.070.9250.216 - If you have any questions about using this list, please send a message to d.lloyd at openehr.org
