From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Thu Mar 09 2006 - 15:53:03 CST
Gusztáv Jánvári wrote:
> I’m in localizing Unicode symbol names to Hungarian, and I have to translate
> the symbol name “measured by”: I studied incredibely lot of Math :), but
> unfortunatelly I’m not sure when this symbol is used.
I know some math but I have never seen U+225E used anywhere. The code
charts in the Unicode Standard do not comment on it, so all we know
about it directly is that it is a mathematical operator (and some formal
properties).
> My not-too-educated
> guess is that it is used to express that the fact of the equality is
> determined by measuring something (for example, when you fill in two glasses
> with the same amount of water and both looks like it is completely full, you
> could say, they are equal by measure).
I would intuitively expect the symbol to mean what its Unicode name
says, so that X U+225E Y means that X has been measured by Y, whatever
_that_ means. But this is just speculation.
The French name at http://www.unicode.org/fr/charts/PDF/U2200.pdf is
MESURÉ PAR, i.e. a direct translation of the Unicode name (interpreted
as being English). As far as I have understood, Hungarian is a rather
synthetic language that lacks direct (or even close) counterparts to
prepositions like English “by”, so a direct translation would not be
possible. So this really sounds tricky.
> Thanks for any help. (A solution is required from me in a day.)
Oh my. I wonder if there is some localization of Unicode character names
going on in the world. I recently got a message from a Finnish
localizer, requesting for help with mathematical symbols, apparently
related to localization of software from a you-know-which large software
company. It would be a good idea to localize names of characters e.g. in
applications and features like Character Map, but a bad idea to do that
hastily. The problem is that the localized names would then be used as
“de facto standards”, no matter how poorly chosen they were.
Localization of character names should be based on a reasonable
consensus within a language community, or within the group of people in
such a community that are interested and competent in the specific topic
to which the characters relate. You really need experts in math to find
even acceptable (not to mention good) localized names for characters
like U+225E, and you even need the result of some discussion among such
experts, not just one man’s opinion.
There might be some standards that name even some less commonly known
mathematical symbols, such as a national standard corresponding to ISO
31-11 (if it exists, in the applicable language). A standard does not
always correspond to common practice, but it would be a reasonable
starting point. Unfortunately many standards that mention special
characters by name do not identify them as Unicode code points but only
as images on paper, so interpreting them is not always obvious.
If you cannot find national standards or agreements or other reliable
sources (such as glossaries by national scientific societies), I would
suggest that you leave character names untranslated, i.e. specify that
the official Unicode names be used for now. You could write them in
upper case, e.g. MEASURED BY, to distinguish them from actual localizations.
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