--On Monday, 21 November, 2005 10:11 -0800 Thomas Gal <tom@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> I understand this. But it restricts RFC to the sole English >> (ASCII) language. >> Translating RFC as an authoritative text is therefore >> impossible. jfc > > Well there's a reason pilots and sailors and other people > who's business is truly international use english. We can't > legitamately expect technical issues to be drafted in every > language (just like we can't expect pilots to all know 5 > languages) either. While I believe in the cultural and > intellectual value of different languages in exposing > different viewpoints and ways of thinking I don't believe > there's anything technically oriented that *can't* be > expressed in english as well as any other language. It just so >... > Nor > do I have the personal motivation to translate a technical > document to hungarian or spanish though I could, because, > fluent or not, that's still REALLY hard and depending in any > way on being technically colloquial in many languages, and > doing a good job at it. > That's not to say that anyone won't welcome translations of > important documents, but perhaps that's a much better job for > the UN then the IETF. Tom, let me take this a step further. Almost every other international standards body, ISO and ITU included, end up with an authoritative version in one language for technical standards and then with translations that are considered less authoritative. I.e., if the translation disagrees with the original authoritative version, the latter controls -- there is no battle among translations as to which version is the most accurate. Even then, the best of the translations are validated by the well-known, but difficult, time-consuming, and expensive, process of having independent parties prepare back translations to the original language, followed by a careful technical comparison of the two. For the most technical standards, translation is typically waived because it is generally assumed that, if one is going to get conformance and interoperability --and be sure one knows what that means-- then there had best be only one version, rather than standardized interpretations of it. And the belief that any of this really has anything to do with whether the base document is expressed in ASCII or not, or whether its figures use ASCII artwork or images in some conventional or standard form, is, to be polite, a stretch: remember that ASCII is inadequate to express all of English accurately. To use your example because it is handy, while more characters than those in ASCII are needed to properly write Spanish or Hungarian (as with English), one cannot write any of the three, or French, without those characters. Things would get much more interesting with Chinese, Japanese, or Arabic, but, again, the form in which figures are expressed is the least of the issues. john _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf