"Rémy Marchand" wrote:
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> With humans, it is different.
>
> What will happen in the future if e-commerce B to B is developped
> internationally which is undoubtely a desirable situation since our
> companies are trading at this international level ?
>
> Humans from all countries will send and receive messages and there is no
> doubt that - even if
> these messages are capable to go from an application in company A to another
> one in a
> different company B - humans will at least supervise and monitor the whole
> process.
> These humans will not be top managers, but operational persons in
> wharehouses, plants, and so forth.
> They will speak their national language and will be far from being fluent in
> english. I remember being lost at 11 p.m. in the Netherlands asking for my
> way in a country where I thought everybody was fluent in english. The
> reality was quite different.
>
> In conclusion, my own opinion is that standardisation bodies can have
> english as a working language, in order to develop agreed terms (nouns,
> verbs). The
> question is then " why not having these english wordings as tags ? "
> My answer is that humans - when looking at a transaction set (for an example
> an Order which cannot be fulfilled as the client would like it to be, which
> is a critical situation regarding the satisfaction of this client) - need
> not only see the values of the fields but also the names of these fields,
> i.e. the tags OR an equivalent of the tag IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGE..
>
> The reality of EDIFACT when examined at the national level is that tags
> (NAD, MOA etc..) have not been translated but that each of them has a
> developped version <NAD = Name and Address> <MOA = Monetary Amount> and that
> each EDIFACT message has a national language version. The user interface
> will not be
> (in France for example) <Name and Address> but preferably <Nom et Adresse>.
>
Rémy:
This may be off-topic but I think you might find the ideas
interesting. I recently completed a project a Swedish company.
The company was a traditional publishing company. Originally
they asked me to write the DTD in Swedish. Being an English
speaking American and not speaking Swedish, I loved the challenge |-).
Before we started the DTD, they realized the investment they were
making in analyzing and modeling their data.
Analysis is always the hardest and most expensive part
of an XML project. The DTD is easy once the analysis is completed.
They realized the value of their DTD. They thought that they
may be able to capitalize globally on their internal DTD so we
wrote the DTD in English.
The editors of the content are all fluent in English
but it really isn't fair to have them work on a daily basis
with English. We used a product called FrameMaker + SGML
for the content development and paper publishing. The tag
names are represented to the editors in Swedish but the tags
behind the scenes is English.
This is a proprietary approach for FrameMaker and it
works very well. However, with Architectural Forms we could
provide a standardized approach for this problem. It would
be very easy for software to work with Architectural Forms.
Here is a very quick example:
<!ELEMENT name (#PCDATA)>
<!ATTLIST name
French CDATA #FIXED "nom"
Swedish CDATA #FIXED "nam">
To me, this approach seems like a simple way of handling
multilingual requirements.
One of the things that the EDI companies are providing us are
some nice mapping tools. I think all the mappers that support
XML would find it very easy to inplement simple architectural
forms capability. Basically their are just a predefined
roadmap.
Betty
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Betty Harvey | Phone: 301-540-8251 FAX: 4268
Electronic Commerce Connection, Inc. |
13017 Wisteria Drive, P.O. Box 333 |
Germantown, Md. 20874 |
[EMAIL PROTECTED] | Washington,DC SGML/XML Users Grp
URL: http://www.eccnet.com | http://www.eccnet.com/xmlug/
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