The idea that Knowledge Representation must occur in English means those
that speak it poorly, and many others fail to reach the people who are
part of the constituency and as such they fall short of the IETF's
capabilities to deliver. They also may actually become victims of the
language barrier
If we had a normative XML format, that can easily be translated into both
viewable and printable HTML, then one could imagine a project to translate
all the RFCs into many languages in conjunction with Google Translate.
This particular translation tool offers the user the possibility of correcting
an inadequate translation. The tool learns from these corrections and
therefore the translations of later RFCs would be more accurate even
before a human gets involved.
This kind of automated translation does not work well with fixed length
line paginated text. In other words it works better with text in a flowable
format so that formatting is separate from the content itself.
And for really stupid things like diagrams which are so critical to have
in all technology briefs and that those briefs made out of ASCII
characters alone have really bad diagrams generally...
XML also offers a standard called SVG for diagrams, which retains the
text labels of diagrams in a format which could be processed by
automated translation tools like Google Translate. Currently Google
translate doesn't process SVG, but the possibility exists unlike with
many other image formats.
--Michael Dillon
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