[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Foreign Names
Don Park wrote: > My understanding is that most software engineers, no matter where they > are, can read English well enough to distinguish and infer enough > meaning from English element types to use them. In Korea, for example, > English is everywhere and most Koreans can recognize the words even if > they can't pronounce them. But that is begging the question. The more technology is difficult for non-English users to use, the fewer non-English users there will be. In any case, it is not true. Here is Taiwan, almost all Microsoft applications are localized and no-one uses anything else. For databases, people will use Chinese names where possible. As for ASCII characters being available on a keyboard, there is the fair question of "what about transliterating the local language into the latin alphabet?", but that has problems for tonal languages, or languages where there are many homophones. And many people don't know the standard orthography anyway: here in Taiwan my local street is spelled 3 different ways and there are 3 different pronunciations anyway depending on the language used. In any case, XML data is often sourced from databases, and there are databases with native-language fieldnames. And there is another big issue in approach too, which goes to the heart of what is "interoperability": should it be easier to send data to someone on the other side of the world than to someone at the next desk? I think standards which make local transport more difficult offer a bogus kind of interoperability: data transfer is more often local than to far away. (Which is why a UTF-8/UTF-16-as-the-only-encodings-allowed approach seems to have failed when it has been tried. Look at WAP: they are developing it in their local encodings and figuring out how it fits together afterwards: it is pragmatic to support that approach, though it is slack.) English-only fits into that kind of bogus interoperability, unless we are creating a world of only Big Schemas. I would hope that the advent of namespaces can allow more extending of schemas, even though the base schema may well be in English acronyms. (B.t.w., I think XML Schemas does provide support for multilingual architectures--these are not marked up explicitly but derived during document traversal: I think an XML Schema with abstract elements is nothing more than a base architecture. In practise, you define your Schema in the canonical language, then derive [by reproduction, on draft said] various concrete DTDs using native-language tagnames. Your abstract schema says "potato" and my concrete schema says "potato".) > Of course, we are talking about simple or > well-known words like office, automation, web, starcraft, order, name; > not words like pedantic. I think any schema rapidly becomes technical. I think Don would be particularly interested that words like "pedantic" are rarely used for element names: adjectives tend to be given by attributes. It is interesting to speculate that someone from a language which had little distinction between adjectives and nouns might find it unnatural to have elements and attributes, while someone whose mind was formed learning a language with a sharp distinction may find the element/attribute distiction completely natural. But instead, I wonder if a case could be made that, for languages which have no lexical difference between words used adjectivally and words used as nouns, the provision in XML of elements and attributes may provide a needed grammatical indication of which role the word should serve? If this seems a pretty thin speculation, I hope it is not pedantic or rude of me to think that "most software engineers...can read English" is too? Rick Jelliffe *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ ***************************************************************************
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