[apps-discuss] Non-English reading lists (was: Re: Request to publish draft-ietf-appsawg-rfc3536bis-02)

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Friday, June 10, 2011 15:32 +0200 Frank Ellermann
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> +1.  I'm still not convinced that a BCP with an international
> audience should contain a reading list for a mainly English
> audience, but hopefully we'll arrive at better solutions in
> future RFCs.

Frank,

A big problem, especially for a BCP or standards-track document,
is the question of evaluation of the references.  Using myself
as a handy example, I can read a few languages other than
English, but I absolutely do not know the internationalization
literature in those languages to be able to know what to
recommend (or even to evaluate a recommendation).  I know that
there are some materials in English that we did not list, not
because they were overlooked, but because they are pretty bad
(at least in my opinion or Paul's, but the WG Last Call didn't
turn up complaints about their omission).

But let me make a suggestion.   If you want to gather up some
people who could do (and that includes cross-checking and
evaluating) a reading list in one or more languages (I'd
recommend doing it in annotated bibliography form) or even a
multilingual thesaurus of i18n terminology, I'd assume that the
Independent Submission Editor would be included to publish such
a thing as relevant and useful to the community.  I can't speak
for the ISE, of course, but you could check first if you wanted
to go ahead with such an effort.  There would be some issues
about publication in other than English and publication in
page-layout (PS and/or PDF) form to capture the relevant
characters and not have to resort entirely to transliteration.
However, we've had PS-only RFCs in the past and the rules permit
them as special exceptions when justified.  And, while I haven't
asked him, I note that the Acting RSE is not a native speaker of
English and might be sympathetic to the goal.

     john