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

[Steve Sheng <steve.sheng@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thank you Avri, I get your point now, and thank you for raising it.

According to RFC 6365:

   transliteration

      The process of representing the characters of an alphabetical or
      syllabic system of writing by the characters of a conversion
      alphabet. <RFC6365 <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6365> >

      Many script transliterations are exact, and many have perfect
      round-trip mappings.  The notable exception to this is
      romanization, described above.  Transliteration involves
      converting text expressed in one script into another script,
      generally on a letter-by-letter basis.  There are many official
      and unofficial transliteration standards, most notably those from
      ISO TC 46 and the U.S. Library of Congress.

   transcription

      The process of systematically writing the sounds of some passage
      of spoken language, generally with the use of a technical phonetic
      alphabet (usually Latin-based) or other systematic transcriptional
      orthography.  Transcription also sometimes refers to the
      conversion of written text into a transcribed form, based on the
      sound of the text as if it had been spoken. <RFC6365
<http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6365> >

Thus, I think you are correct, transliteration is only representing the
characters of an alphabetical or syllabic system of writing. For ideographic
scripts such as Chinese, it should be transcription (or Romanization).

Thus, based on the description above, I recommend transcription be included
in the report as well as recommendations along with translation and
transliteration.  

What do others think?

Steve


On 9/19/11 9:51 AM, "Avri Doria" <avri@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> 
> 
> 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
> 
> 
>