From: Richard Ishida (ishida@w3.org)
Date: Mon Jan 21 2008 - 09:33:34 CST
I was surprised to see that this munges together the terms and concepts of
transcription and transliteration[1][2]. As I read through the document I
kept changing my mind about whether this is about one or the other. The
guidelines expend some effort on discussing the needs of reversible text,
but don't appear to disallow non-reversible transcriptions, and some of the
systems you provide for (eg. Korean) provide transcriptions rather than
transliterations.
(I understand that in a technical sense, transliteration is distinguished
from transcription by being reversible, ie. allowing you to exactly
reconstruct the original sequence from the transliterated sequence.)
I think the document should start out with clear definitions that
distinguish these two approaches, since it is very useful to apply the term
transliteration in a very specific technical sense here.
If you are describing guidelines for transcription and/or transliteration, I
would change the title and early on describe transliteration as a special
thing, and make it clearer where guidelines and commentary refer to one or
the other. I would also include stronger text about the benefits of each,
and how to decide which you want.
If you are actually describing a mechanism intended for transliterations, in
the narrow sense, I suggest that after the para that starts "Transliteration
is not translation... " You add another para that starts "Transliteration
is not transcription..." and at least introduces the key difference (though
it could point down the page for more details and examples), and then
throughout the document be stricter about disallowing any approach that
would introduce non-reversibility.
RI
See Wikipedia definitions:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_%28linguistics%29
============
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
http://www.w3.org/International/
http://rishida.net/blog/
http://rishida.net/
> -----Original Message-----
> From: unicore-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicore-bounce@unicode.org] On
> Behalf Of Rick McGowan
> Sent: 19 January 2008 16:58
> To: unicode@unicode.org
> Subject: Unicode Transliteration Guidelines released
>
> The Unicode CLDR committee has released
> "Unicode Transliteration Guidelines":
> http://www.unicode.org/cldr/transliteration_guidelines.html
>
> Regards,
> Rick McGowan
> Unicode, Inc.
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