Re: Possible BofF question -- I18n (was: Re: Possible OBF question -- I18n)

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

--On Thursday, May 31, 2018 16:31 +0100 "tom p."
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> I have always seen the centre of gravity of i18n as firmly in
> Europe.  I recall the struggles 40 years ago to persuade
> American organisations to take it seriously; I have always
> seen ASCII as an American response to the issue.

Actually, while I can't speak for what you see, the centre (sic)
of gravity changed around two decades ago and that (Western,
Latin-script-using) European orientation turned into a problem
as people using that script assumed that the issues associated
with their languages were the hard ones and that they could
think about everything else in those terms.  Our colleagues in
Asia (eastern and western), parts of Africa, and probably
elsewhere, know better, including knowing about scripts whose
characters are always written in connected form, that may have
right to left or top to bottom characteristics, that have very
different conventions about punctuation and word and sentence
separation than Latin and closely-related scripts, and so on
(that is definitely not a complete list).   The impetus for IDN
work came from East and Southeast Asia, not Europe, and other
examples abound.   

There are active IETF participants whose daily work and/or
family lives include use of Arabic script (in both Arabic
language and Persian-derived variations), Chinese script,
Cyrillic, Hebrew script, Korean Hangul, scripts and writing
systems of the Indian Subcontinent, and others I apologize for
not being able to think of at the moment.  At least as much
pressure is, or should be, coming from them as from those who
merely need a handful or what we sometimes call decorated Roman
letters.

  There is very serious work on internationalization in China,
India, Israel, Japan, Russia, Ukraine, a number of
Arabic-speaking countries, and others I either don't know about
or that don't come to mind at the moment.

> Most of what I have learnt since comes from people who appear,
> from their affiliation, to be centred in Europe so I am not
> surprised that i18n efforts in the IETF do not reach as
> satisfactory a conclusion as some other work since the IETF
> has long had a closer connection with North America than other
> regions of the world.
> 
> So where should the work take place?  In a Europe-centric
> organisation, perhaps the EU (who put a lot of effort into
> some fields of IT), the ITU (which after all does recognise
> languages other than American in its work) or some such; and
> then there is Unicode which represents a certain competence in
> this area:-)

I don't want to start a conversation about specific
organizations here, but each of those you mention has what I
believe the IETF would conclude has an unattractive track record
where internationalization is considered broadly in an Internet
context.  Note too that decisions to work in multiple languages
(and the ability to execute on those decisions) is very
different from decisions to develop protocols that function well
in many (or all) languages and, as I said earlier, while coding
is critically important, it is not all of the problem or even
most of it.

> I have wondered if the focus for this work would shift to the
> CJK parts of the world, as they became more engaged in
> mainstream IT, since European code page issues seem trivial
> compared to those of CJK, but I have not detected any such
> movement; Europe still seems to be the most concerned with
> this issue and so most likely to put effort into progress.

Interesting.  I suggest you have been looking in the wrong
places, even about participants in the IETF.

     best,
     john