From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Tue Dec 03 2002 - 15:27:14 EST
Doug, seconding a suggestion by Marco, wrote:
> I agree
> that a multilingual Unicode glossary should be assembled (possibly as a
> volunteer project) and officially endorsed by the Unicode Consortium, so
> users and vendors will be on common terminological ground.
In general, I favor such an activity, although at the moment
it would have to be something done by outside volunteers, as
the UTC editorial committee doesn't have the bandwidth now
(in the crunch for Unicode 4.0) to undertake more open-ended
responsibilities.
My caution, however, is that the terminology used by the
Unicode Standard is still evolving -- as witness the ongoing
arguments about some of the terminology related to the
character encoding model. The glossary in Unicode 4.0 will
be substantially revised in some of the key points having
a bearing on the Unicode encoding model. And as more content
is added to the standard, additional terms keep accumulating
in the glossary as well.
And it will be some time before the online glossary can be
completely synched back up with the Unicode 4.0 glossary.
Once people start maintaining a multilingual glossary
based on the online glossary (or supplemented from other
sources), the burden of maintenance will escalate rapidly
for any change introduced to terminology. These things only
work if there is an ongoing institutional commitment to
maintenance and updates. Otherwise all the translated
versions start to get out-of-synch quickly, both with
the English original and with each other. This can lead
to dangerous misunderstandings among people who assume that
their own translated version is accurate.
So if anyone wants to undertake such an effort, don't
forget to provide for ongoing maintenance and for the
fact that eager volunteers tend to drop like flies when
repeatedly forced to update their work at irregular
intervals.
--Ken
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