Re: [Ltru] Minor proofreading nits again (was: Re: draft-davis-t-langtag-ext-03)

["Jukka K. Korpela" <[e-mail]>]

14.07.2011 01:59, CE Whitehead wrote:

> I looked over http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-davis-t-langtag-ext-03
> quickly;

For some reason, I cannot access version 3. When I try to use the above 
URL, the server redirects (with code 302) to
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-davis-t-langtag-ext-02
i.e. version 2. And when I asked the W3C Markup Validator to check the 
page (it detected an error by the way: duplicate definition of id 
"ref-BCP47"), it got the old version, too.

> "Transforms such as transliteration may vary depending not only on the
> basis of the source and target script, but also on language. Thus
> the Russian <U+041F U+0443 U+0442 U+0438 U+043D> (which corresponds
> to the Cyrillic <PE, U, TE, I, EN>) transliterates into "Putin" in
> English but "Poutine" in French.
[...]
> { COMMENT: Try "Transforms such as transliterations?" (that is, make
> "transliterations" plural I think).

Maybe the plural would be clearer, but the content says "may vary", 
implying that there are different transliterations.

I would be more worried about potential problems caused by the 
expressions "in English" and "in French", which might be seen as 
implying that the language environment dictates the transliteration. For 
the sample name and sample languages, this happens to be true, but in 
general, there is a lot of variation of transliteration systems used in 
texts in English (e.g., Cyrillic ha, U+0445, may be transliterated as kh 
or h, and don't make me started on Arabic names).

Moreover, "on language" is somewhat mild, as transliteration may depend 
both on the original language of a name (or other text) and on the 
language environment where the transliteration is used - and only the 
latter is discussed in the example. For example, Cyrillic letters can be 
transliterated according to different principles depending on whether 
they are Russian, Ukrainian, Khantuan, or something else.

I would say "but also on source language and in the language context 
where the transliteration is used". And maybe the example could be 
replaced by a more difficult one - like a Greek name that has multiple 
translations, depending on whether it is treated as a classical name or 
a modern name, on the language of the context, and on the specific 
transliteration scheme used.

-- 
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/