From: Antoine Leca (Antoine10646@leca-marti.org)
Date: Wed Apr 13 2005 - 02:51:22 CST
David Starner wrote:
> On Apr 12, 2005 2:58 PM, Patrick Andries wrote:
>> The proper reference could often use a localized name. No need to
>> show users an English long winded name (with potentially a spelling
Patrick did a mistake above, probably misguided by the usual language used
on this list to make us able to speak together. It used "English", where of
course he meant "Standardese", this particular dialect where words should
have unambiguous meanings, etc., dialect which is used when it comes to give
a long name to a character, as everything in the body of a standard.
>> The proper reference could often use a localized name. No need to
>> show users an English long winded name (with potentially a spelling
>> mistake and missing diacritics when compared to the local tradition
>> spelling), one could very well show Chinese, Spanish, German or
>> French names of the characters.
> And what about the correct English names?
Well, consider that _this time_ English would not experience any advantage
over the other languages in the world, and that English developpers should
ALSO do their little bit of work to have their proper localization.
Even if it is WIDELY more work than usual (sorry it hits you guys), please
consider:
-- that the biggest part of the work is already done, since Standardese is
close (but not the same as) U.S. English
-- that English is among the widest spocken languages in the world, so you
guys should not have too much problem to find workload to have the job done
(something quite a bit more difficult to say Maltese.)
-- that this bring a formidable opportunity to your British, Canadian _and_
Australian cousins to have the proper orthographies shown ;-).
Sorry if you consider me a bit blunt on this issue, but we are on the
Unicode mailing list, which is supposed to be concerned with i18n/l10n.
And sometimes it happens to be two ways, not always one way.
> There are a lot of English speaking users out there who would like
> correct names, too.
The bad fact is that this set of "English speaking users" are likely to be
much more wide than any other group, or perhaps second only to the Chinese
reading users (not even sure): many people here, including Patrick (!),
consider the long names, or perhaps the long name completed with the
annotations, as published by Unicode or ISO, to be the English names of the
characters.
This is so because English speaking (or more exactly English reading) is
becoming a given (requisite, depending from where you're looking) for many
computing related tasks. The very idea of i18n could have been to avoid
this. We could see here how well it succeeds, in this forum.
Antoine
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