On Mon, 12 Mar 2018 07:39:53 +0000, Alastair Houghton wrote: > > On 11 Mar 2018, at 21:14, Marcel Schneider via Unicode wrote: > > > > Indeed, to be fair. And for implementers, documenting themselves in English > > may scarcely ever have much of a problem, no matter whatʼs the locale. > > Agreed. Implementers will already understand English; you can’t write > computer software > without, since almost all documentation is in English, almost all computer > languages are > based on English, and, to be frank, a large proportion of the software market > is itself > English speaking. I have yet to meet a software developer who didn’t speak > English. > > That’s not to say that people wouldn’t appreciate a translation of the > standard, but there are, > as others have pointed out, obvious maintenance problems, not to mention the > issue that > plagues some international institutions, namely the fact that translations > are necessarily > non-canonical and so those who really care about the details of the rules > usually have to refer > to a version in a particular language (sometimes that language might be > French rather than > English; very occasionally there are two versions declared, for political > reasons, to both be > canonical, which is obviously risky as there’s a chance they might differ > subtly on some point, > perhaps even because of punctuation).
Sometimes it occurred in the EU that the French version was so sloppy it transformed the issue to entirely another one, but at the Unicode‐ISO/IEC merger the bad will was clearly on the other side — > > In terms of widespread understanding of the standard, which is where I think > translation is > perhaps more important, I’m not sure translating the actual standard itself > is really the way > forward. It’d be better to ensure that there are reliable translations of > books like > Unicode Demystified or Unicode Explained - or, quite possibly, other books > aimed more at > the general public rather than the software community per se. Good point. What we need most of all is a complete terminology, as well as full ranges of character names in every language, to enable people to talk about it after reading in English. Best regards, Marcel
