Translating the standard (was: Re: Fonts and font sizes used in the Unicode)

[Marcel Schneider via Unicode]

On 08/03/18 19:33, Arthur Reutenauer <arthur.reutenauer at normalesup.org> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Mar 08, 2018 at 07:05:06PM +0100, Marcel Schneider via Unicode wrote:
> > https://www.amazon.fr/Unicode-5-0-pratique-Patrick-Andries/dp/2100511408/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206989878&sr=8-1
> 
> You’re linking to the wrong one of Patrick’s books :-) The
> translation he made of version 3.1 (not 5.0) of the core specification
> is available in full at http://hapax.qc.ca/ (“Unicode et ISO 10646 en
> français”, middle of page), as well as a few free sample chapters from
> his other book.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Arthur
> 

Indeed, thank you very much for correction, and thanks for the link.

I can tell so much that the free online chapters of Patrick Andriesʼ translation 
of the Unicode standard were to me the first introduction, more precisely ch. 7 
(Punctuation) which I even printed out to get in touch with the various dashes 
and spaces and learn more about quotation marks. [I didnʼt have internet and
took the copy home from a library.] Based on this experience, I think there isnʼt 
too much extrapolation in supposing that millions of newcomers in all countries 
could use such a translation. Although the latest version of TUS is obviously more 
up‐to‐date, version 3.1 isnʼt plain wrong at all. Hence I warmly recommend to
translate at least v3.1 — or those chapters of v10.0 that are already in v3.1 — 
while prompting the reader to seek further information on the Unicode website.

We note too that Patrickʼs translation is annotated (footnotes in gray print) with
additional information of interest for the target locale. (Here one could mention 
that Latin script requires preformatted superscript letters for an interoperable 
representation of current text in some languages.)

Some Unicode terminology like “bidi‐mirroring” may be hard to adapt but that 
isnʼt more of a challenge than any tech/science writer is facing when handling 
content that was originally produced in the United States and/or, more generally,
in English. E.g. in French we may choose from a panel of more conservative 
through less usual grammatical forms among which: “réflexion bidi”, “réflexion
bidirectonnelle”, “bidi‐reflexion” (hyphenated or not), “réflexible” or, simply, 
“miroir”. Anyway, every locale is expected to localize the full range of Unicode 
terminology — unless people agree to switch to English whenever the topic is 
Unicode, even while discussing any other topic currently in Chinese or in Japanese, 
although doing so is not a problem, itʼs just ethically weird.

So we look forward to the concept of a “Unicode in Practice” textbook implemented
in Chinese and in Japanese and in any other non‐English and non‐French locale if it
isnʼt already.

As of translating the Core spec as a whole, why did two recent attempts crash even 
before the maintenance stage, while the 3.1 project succeeded?

Some pieces of the puzzle seem to be still missing.

Best regards,

Marcel