Re: [Maybe OT] localized names of the Unicode Control characters

From: Patrick Andries (Patrick.Andries@xcential.com)
Date: Thu May 29 2003 - 18:04:33 EDT

  • Next message: Philippe Verdy: "Re: "book end" or <enclosing characters> in most languages?"

    From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)

    >From: "Marco Cimarosti" <marco.cimarosti@essetre.it>
    >> ISO 10646 has the French translation of all the character names. In most
    >> cases, the French names are just literal translations of the English ones
    >> but,

    Even « literal » translations may help disambiguate English forms by the
    introduction of prepositions (e.g. "variant selector" may be misinterpreted
    by a translator unaware of its role as a slighly different selector (variant
    as an adjective, variante de sélecteur) rather than a selector of variants
    (variant as a noun, « sélecteur de variants »))

    >> in a few cases, they have a completely different wording, which can
    >> provide a better starting point for translations in other languages.

    True.

    >If you look in the French localization of the Windows XP version of the
    "charmap" tool, you'll see that

    >Microsoft displays these French translations for character names. There are
    however some "strange"

    >translations that lack a common formal format that allows easier searching
    for related characters.

    I would be interested off-line (et en français) to learn about these «
    strange » translations. I do not dispute this could be the case, some are
    inherited and some (especially the block names) are Microsoft's own name and
    differ from the ISO 10646 names, and of course some may be due to the French
    translation team.

    >I did not know that ISO10646 lists French versions of these names, and
    wonder if this is normative.

    They are.

    >If so, why aren't these French names listed by some derived Unicode file
    (which would combine the UCD >with the file ISO10646 French names) ?

    A file similarly formatted to
    http://www.unicode.org/Public/4.0-Update/NamesList-4.0.0.txt exists here
    http://pages.infinit.net/hapax/ListeDesNoms.htm .

    >There are cases where the use of a single language is not enough to clearly
    indicate the semantic of a

    >character with a short name, and a translation may sometimes be useful as
    an additional reference to avoid

    >ambiguities, or simply to match a common typographic convention widely used
    by publishers to designate

    >these characters or symbols.

    I agree.

    P. A.



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