Translating the standard

[Marcel Schneider via Unicode]

On Fri, 9 Mar 2018 08:41:35 -0800, Ken Whistler wrote:
> 
> 
> On 3/9/2018 6:58 AM, Marcel Schneider via Unicode wrote:
> > 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?
> 
> Essentially because both the Japanese and the Chinese attempts were 
> conceived of as commercial projects, which ultimately did not cost out 
> for the publishers, I think. Both projects attempted limiting the scope 
> of their translation to a subset of the core spec that would focus on 
> East Asian topics, but the core spec is complex enough that it does not 
> abridge well. And I think both projects ran into difficulties in trying 
> to figure out how to deal with fonts and figures.

This is normally catered for by Unicode whose fonts are donated and 
licensed for the sole purpose of documenting the Standard. See FAQ.

Templates of any material to be translated are sent by Unicode, arenʼt 
they? The Unicode home page reads: “An essential part of our mission 
is to educate and engage academic and scientific communities, and 
the general public.” Therefore, translators should just have to translate 
e.g. the NamesList following Kenʼs sample localization (TN #24) — 
which is already a hard piece of work — and send the file to Unicode, 
to get a localized version of the Code Charts. Likewise ISO/IEC 10646 
is available in a French version or at least, it should have an official 
 French version like all ISO standards.

If Unicode donʼt own the tooling yet, Apple shall be happy to donate the 
funding to get Unicode in a position to fulfill their mission thoroughly,
like Apple (supposedly) donate non‐trivial amounts to many vendors to 
get them remove old software from the internet.

Using such localized NamesLists with Unibook to browse the Code Charts 
locally is another question, since that supposes handing the fonts out to 
the general public. So that is clearly a non‐starter. But browsing localized
Code Charts in Adobe Reader would be a nice facility.

Best regards,

Marcel