Re: are Unicode codes somehow specified in official national linguistic literature ? (worldwide)

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Wed Jun 14 2006 - 06:04:23 CDT

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    From: "Erkki Kolehmainen" <erkki.kolehmainen@kotus.fi>
    > The UCS (ISO/IEC 10646) and Unicode code points are identical, so this
    > doesn't cause any problem for official referencing.
    >
    > Since ISO/IEC/JTC1 is not working on enhancing the structure of locale
    > data (nor should it be, in light of the track record), and the
    > registration facility that it has provided is both inflexible and
    > totally insufficient, ignoring the opportunities provided by CLDR is a
    > major disservice to your user community, nominally justified only by
    > some unjustifiable formality.

    May be sometime, the value of the CLDR will be recognized as valuable as a international standard supported by a new ISO working group, when the various government and their cultural institutions will consider it useful as a common working base to work on translation and localization of their official documents; there are already some standards applied invarious institutions (including the United Nations, and the European Union with their translation guides, but it would be useful that these rules merge together their efforts andfind some agreement.

    For now the CLDR is the only localization standard project that encompasses so many languages. And I'm sure that it isstarting to get some insterest from the existing institutions to adapt their translation guide (and notably in the European Union since its recent enlargement, and for the preparation of further enlargements). It may be interesting also for the NATO, the OECD, the OSCE, and as well for lots of institutions working for the United Nations, or the WTO and the WIPO for the issues that are already happening in the protection of trademarks, or the various national institutions working on geographic toponyms.

    So it should be time to send invitations for participation to their secretariat. Don't forget also the Unicef for its worldwide support of education and litteracy. And may be, create a new formal working group separate from the UTC, for working on localization issues, and also send an invitation to ISO to support this working group.

    The main problem with ISO is that its members are governments only, and they often support only the official languages. So it would not cover lots of languages. Anyway, the official languages should be covered in the CLDR using the rules supported by governements. So the ISO working group would work only on their official languages, and a "rapporteur" could make the link with the independant Unicode supported group which would include other cultural institutions working on non official and regional languages.

    The exact form of collaboration between Unicode and Unicode is still not defined by such rules, but the past has demonstrated that such collaboration was possible for the encoding of characters. Let's continue for the work on localization data that lots of people and organizations (notably software makers) are expecting now, to reduce the cost of localization of their computing systems and a better adaptation to many more local markets.



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