At 11:36 13/11/2000 +0800, Jacob Palme wrote:
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:
Before you talk about a language translation standard, I think you have to
define a model within which language translation will work.
For example:
- is translation carried out locally, remotely or both?
- is the original always included in a message, so that a message is
self-contained, or does the model depend on references between messages?
- does translation occur before sending, in transit (shudder) or after
delivery?
Before being clear about this, it is not even clear to me that there is a
*need* for a standard; if all translation occurs locally and post-delivery,
there is very little a standard contributes.
(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/
--
Harald Tveit Alvestrand, alvestrand(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com
+47 41 44 29 94
Personal email: Harald(_at_)Alvestrand(_dot_)no