Language translation in e-mail standards

I have been thinking many times on how to best support
language translation in e-mail standards. We have now
received a research grant, which will allow us to
implement this next year.

Some requirements on a language translation standard:

(1) It should cater for both machine and human translations.

(2) It should cater for more than one translation of the
    same message, usually first a machine translation and
    later on a human translation of the same message.

(3) It should cater for both the case where all language
    versions are sent at the same time, and when one
    language version is sent first and the translations
    are sent later.

(4) It should cater for sending a message to a human
    or machine for translation, with information on
    where to forward it after translation.

(5) It should cater for people to indicate that they
    can read more than one language, and to indicate
    preferences, like in HTTP where you can specify
    Accept-Language: da, en-gb;q=0.8, en;q=0.7.
    It should users to specify that they want
    for example the original language for French
    and English, and that they prefer a German
    original to a machine-translation to English,
    but prefer the English translation if it was
    made by a human.

(6) It should gracefully degrade its functionality
    to old mailers not using the standard.

Any comments on these requirements? Anything missing?
--
Jacob Palme <jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/jpalme/
--
Jacob Palme <jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/jpalme/