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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Multi-lingual experiment - a call for action
Didier wrote :
> It make sense to have a DTD in each language so that, people can experiment
> translating form one language to an other. Do not forget that the experiment
> is about the result of a database.
I suspect that we have a slight disagreement though about what we
mean by 'translation'. It seems perfectly natural to me to want to
translate a document's character content, that content being a
necessary and crucial part of its meaning.
But as long as we restrict ourselves to a DTD, rather than using -
say - Schema, isn't "translating" the DTD more a matter of
*structure* than one of content ? Documents with different DTDs will
necessarily be of different types; we can *transform* one such type
to another, but can we say that in doing so we have performed a
translation ?
My answer is no - because the essence of 'translating' is not only to
map "STL Tutorial" to "Une introduction à STL" but also to say that a
"title" in english is the same thing as a "titre" in french. This
can't be done, as far as I can tell, with a DTD since it does not
have the means of expressing equivalence between structural
vocabularies. This is why I think this problem would make a perfect
test case for a more sophisticated schema language such as XML
Schema.
> a) Example: translate from an XML document encoded with a French DTD into a
> new XML document encoded in German for trading. Should I mention here that
> this matter of fact will happen with a high probability mainly for exchange
> and trade within the European community.
I would argue that an important requirement here woud be that either
the French or the German version of such a document should pass
validation by the same parser.
If you're hinting at a sort of "folder" of documents where one
"multilingual" element could be the parent of a number of subelements
each representing a different language version of the "same" content,
then it seems to me that it would be desirable that each such
subelement be, structurally, *equivalent* to any other, even if
element names should differ.
Example :
<versions>
<objet xml:lang="français">
<titre>Introduction à STL</titre>
</objet>
<item xml:lang="english">
<title>STL Tutorial</title>
</item>
</versions>
With a (very partial) Schema as follows (if I understand Schema at
all, that is, which might be far from the case...) :
<schema targetNamespace="http://yo.com/polyglot">
<element name="T" type="T" abstract="true"/>
<element name="titre" equivClass="T"/>
<element name="title" equivClass="T"/>
<element name="O" type="O" abstract="true"/>
<element name="objet" equivClass="O"/>
<element name="item" equivClass="O"/>
</schema>
In this case a single XSL transform expressed with (say) french
element names could be used to output the French version of any
<objet> contained within a <versions> folder, even if this <objet> is
in fact an <item>... A rose by any other name, etc. (An interesting
question is how the equivalence classes themselves should be named;
maybe Esperanto...)
> Please, use the accents since French includes accent. If I show you a
> Japanese DTD (unfortunately most mails won't be able to decode UTF-8
> Japanese characters) you'll notice that the elements are full Japanese words
> _not_ cut back ones. So please, include the accents so that it is french not
> a language between two chairs. If we speak of multi-ligual let's be
> multi-lingual. Anyway, don't bother, I'll add them.
Yeah, accents seem to be allowed - looks like I read the spec wrong.
Excerpted from the XML 1.0 spec:
[45] elementdecl ::= '<!ELEMENT' S Name S contentspec S? '>'
[5] Name ::= (Letter | '_' | ':') (NameChar)*
[84] Letter ::= BaseChar | Ideographic
[4] NameChar ::= Letter | Digit | '.' | '-' | '_' | ':' | CombiningChar | Extender
Then again, does the above mean an element name can't *start* with a
diacritic ? That would rule out "éditeur"... It's all spelled out in
the spec but I haven't gotten around to learning Unicode yet - I know
I should !
========================================
Laurent Bossavit - Ingénieur R&D
>>> laurent@m... <<<
>> ICQ#39281367 <<
MultiMania http://www.multimania.fr/
========================================
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