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Re: i18n name badges

2003-11-19 14:40:12
--On Wednesday, November 19, 2003 11:15 -0800 Fred Baker
<fred(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com> wrote:

At 08:23 AM 11/19/2003, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
Proposals for making email addresses fully internationalized
were a hot  topic in Minneapolis. I'd like to suggest a more
modest reform: fully  internationalized IETF name badges.
IETF 59 might be a fine venue for  rolling those out...

No problem, as long as nobody expects anyone in particular to
actually be able to *read* the name badges. I don't read Han
(simplified or traditional), Korean, Kanji, Cyrillic, Arab
(either alphabet) or a variety of other alphabets. I manage
with umlauts and such, because I can make a noise and the
other person can say "yes, that's me, the way you pronounce my
name is...". But I have no clue how to start in a
non-ascii-like alphabet, and frankly with tonal languages such
as Chinese my western mouth is likely to injure the person's
name trying to get it out.

Aside: I had a Taiwanese employee once who would periodically
give me lessons on how to say her name. It sounded to *me*
like I was pronouncing it her way. One can only wonder what
she was hearing...

Just speaking for myself, one of the things I really like
about name badges is being able to determine, upon inspection,
what to call the person standing in front of me.

BTW, while I understand that many Asians can read each other's
writing, I don't think that implies they can read Cyrillic or
Arab either. They're in a similar boat, if not the same one.

What I would suggest, if we do this, is writing the person's
name *twice*: once in their native character set, and once in
a form that an english-reader can read. The latter is an
established interchange architecture. 

Fred, this is exactly what I was suggesting, only partially in
jest.  Native character set, plus punycode, which is much more
precise than a transliteration.  If we don't like the punycode
form,  we probably need to think about what we are doing to
users in the absence of a serious presentation layer.

     john




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