Doug, seconding a suggestion by Marco, wrote: > I agree > that a multilingual Unicode glossary should be assembled (possibly as a > volunteer project) and officially endorsed by the Unicode Consortium, so > users and vendors will be on common terminological ground.
In general, I favor such an activity, although at the moment it would have to be something done by outside volunteers, as the UTC editorial committee doesn't have the bandwidth now (in the crunch for Unicode 4.0) to undertake more open-ended responsibilities. My caution, however, is that the terminology used by the Unicode Standard is still evolving -- as witness the ongoing arguments about some of the terminology related to the character encoding model. The glossary in Unicode 4.0 will be substantially revised in some of the key points having a bearing on the Unicode encoding model. And as more content is added to the standard, additional terms keep accumulating in the glossary as well. And it will be some time before the online glossary can be completely synched back up with the Unicode 4.0 glossary. Once people start maintaining a multilingual glossary based on the online glossary (or supplemented from other sources), the burden of maintenance will escalate rapidly for any change introduced to terminology. These things only work if there is an ongoing institutional commitment to maintenance and updates. Otherwise all the translated versions start to get out-of-synch quickly, both with the English original and with each other. This can lead to dangerous misunderstandings among people who assume that their own translated version is accurate. So if anyone wants to undertake such an effort, don't forget to provide for ongoing maintenance and for the fact that eager volunteers tend to drop like flies when repeatedly forced to update their work at irregular intervals. --Ken
