-----Original Message-----
From: ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
[mailto:ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org] On
Behalf Of John C Klensin
Sent: Monday, November 21, 2005 1:52 PM
To: tom(_at_)triagewireless(_dot_)com
Cc: 'JFC \(Jefsey\) Morfin'; 'Paul Hoffman'; ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Translations of standards (was: RE: ASCII art)
--On Monday, 21 November, 2005 10:11 -0800 Thomas Gal
<tom(_at_)triagewireless(_dot_)com> wrote:
I understand this. But it restricts RFC to the sole English
(ASCII) language.
Translating RFC as an authoritative text is therefore
impossible. jfc
Well there's a reason pilots and sailors and other
people who's
business is truly international use english. We can't legitamately
expect technical issues to be drafted in every language
(just like we
can't expect pilots to all know 5
languages) either. While I believe in the cultural and
intellectual
value of different languages in exposing different
viewpoints and ways
of thinking I don't believe there's anything technically
oriented that
*can't* be expressed in english as well as any other
language. It just
so ...
Nor
do I have the personal motivation to translate a technical
document
to hungarian or spanish though I could, because, fluent or
not, that's
still REALLY hard and depending in any way on being technically
colloquial in many languages, and doing a good job at it.
That's not to say that anyone won't welcome translations of
important documents, but perhaps that's a much better job
for the UN
then the IETF.
Tom, let me take this a step further. Almost every other
international standards body, ISO and ITU included, end up
with an authoritative version in one language for technical
standards and then with translations that are considered less
authoritative. I.e., if the translation disagrees with the
original authoritative version, the latter controls -- there
is no battle among translations as to which version is the
most accurate. Even then, the best of the translations are
validated by the well-known, but difficult, time-consuming,
and expensive, process of having independent parties prepare
back translations to the original language, followed by a
careful technical
comparison of the two. For the most technical standards,
translation is typically waived because it is generally
assumed that, if one is going to get conformance and
interoperability --and be sure one knows what that means--
then there had best be only one version, rather than
standardized interpretations of it.
And the belief that any of this really has anything to do
with whether the base document is expressed in ASCII or not,
or whether its figures use ASCII artwork or images in some
conventional or standard form, is, to be polite, a stretch:
remember that ASCII is inadequate to express all of English
accurately. To use your example because it is handy, while
more characters than those in ASCII are needed to properly
write Spanish or Hungarian (as with English), one cannot
write any of the three, or French, without those characters.
Things would get much more interesting with Chinese,
Japanese, or Arabic, but, again, the form in which figures
are expressed is the least of the issues.
john
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