Re: [weirds] Internationalization Issues

[Byron Ellacott <[e-mail]>]

On 19/10/2012, at 9:33 PM, Andy Newton <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On 10/18/12 8:40 PM, "Byron Ellacott" <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
>> Indicate to the end user that it's not a native language?
>> Auto-translate?

Murray has the right sense of what I meant, for both of these.

>> Negotiate for native language with Accepts-Language, if indicated as
>> possible via a Vary header?
> 
> That's HTTP layer stuff. We're talking about embedding multiple language
> tags in the response.

Are we?  I thought draft-sheng-weirds-icann-rws-dnrd-01 sect. 7.3
suggested a single language tag for the entire response, with "possible
considerations" of multiple language tags.

But, with this point, what I'm suggesting is that the user of a particular
client likely has one or a few preferred languages, which they could
potentially indicate to the server, in the event that the server has multiple
translations.  This would be applicable for mixed language responses as
well as single language responses, since it only indicates a client preference,
not a strict requirement.

My primary perspective on this entire subject is that whatever mechanisms
or systems indicate language or language preference need to be optional,
and should support reasonable use cases for current or likely future operators.
I think there's a use case for language preference indication, as per below,
and I think Ning is suggesting a use case for tagging the language of an
entire response, inline in the response.  What are your (collective "your")
thoughts on how reasonable these use cases are?

>> Some RDAP services will not support multiple languages meaningfully, but
>> there are existing whois services that provide (non-standard, varying)
>> ways to indicate a preferred language on query, with multiple language
>> options available for many response fields.
> 
> Can you provide an example of one of these services so we can query it?
> That would go a long way in helping shape this need, I would think. Are
> there registries that collect contact data in multiple languages?

$ whois -h whois.nic.ad.jp -- 'NET 113.32.19.157'
$ whois -h whois.nic.ad.jp -- 'NET 113.32.19.157 /e'

$ whois -h whois.jprs.jp -- 'jprs.jp'
$ whois -h whois.jprs.jp -- 'jprs.jp /e'

The data labels are sometimes translated, sometimes not.  In the native
language responses, there's often an English translation.  JPRS includes
an English help/info block even for the native language response.  I don't
know for sure if they collect the information in multiple languages, though
I think they do - any JPRS or JPNIC operators on the list to confirm?
Character set is ISO-2022-JP.

I don't know if there are other services with such a switch mechanism,
either - we're all aware of how hard it is to find out what's actually done
out there on port 43 :-) - but for another comparison whois.kisa.kr returns
both native and english output, at least for "kisa.kr".  Character set is
EUC-KR.

  Byron