Re: [ssac-gnso-irdwg] Version 1 of the Draft Final Report

[Avri Doria <avri@xxxxxxx>]

On 12 Sep 2011, at 17:03, Avri Doria wrote:

> Also one possible substantive comment that occurred to me, apologies, while 
> reviewing the translation/transliteration definitions and noting that 
> transliterations were not really viable for logographic based writing 
> systems.  I don't think we ever discussed ascii transcription, at least I do 
> not remember doing so.  I am not suggesting we do so at this point, and I 
> think it would have many of the same problems that transliterations has, and 
> perhaps more - ie. are there even tools for that? 


We spoke about this a bit during the call today.  I was asked to write some 
more about it to the list so that more than just the few people on the call 
could give their opinions on the issue.

First there were two issues confounded in what I wrote:

1 - the idea that the translation or transliterations would be to ASCII.  Jim 
explained that as chair he had been very careful to not indicate what script or 
language the translations would be to if they were done.  So my assumption that 
is would be ASCII was inappropriate and anticipated responses that he hoped to 
get from the issues report or PDP.  While I think it is a safe assumption that 
if there is a translation or transliteration it will be to the script/language 
that is the current whois script, but I accept that this be left open for the 
issues report.

2 - The second point is the one of transcription.  As stated in the report, 
transliteration works only for script based writing systems and not for the 
logograpghic writing systems.  Chinese, as far as I know, cannot be 
transliterated, but it could be transcribed; the sound the word makes could be 
scripted in the script yet to be selected as the possible script for 
translation and transliteration (point 1).  

This issue only occurred to me when reading the report.  It was at that point 
that I realized we had not spoken about the entire category of things one could 
do with non ASCII writing systems, that is we had not spoken about 
transcription of logographic writing systems..  I apologize for not thinking of 
this earlier, it should have occurred to me.

I am not trying to add content to our report and not saying we should discuss 
this now, especially since we could not even come to a recommendation on 
translation and transliteration.  What I am suggesting it that we add this as a 
topic for the issue report we are requesting in recommendation 2.  While the 
staff is considering the issues related to Translation and Transliteration, can 
they also consider Transcription?

thanks

avri