I have been thinking of making the tiny browser SCADA put up at
www.smbd.org
multilingual, and here is the reason why:
I have been planning to migrate to Canada and though the procedure is in
the initial stages, I decided to learn french. Then I met an Indian at a railway
station and he, looking at my french books, well, we started chatting and
he informed me that in the french regions of Canada, you need to know french!
I recalled similar things happening in the past in India. I once even wrote
a operations manual in Marathi!
Now what if say in a control room, there is a french person and un anglais!
or suppose a giant corporation like shell or chevron wanted to integrate
the SCADA or systems working across the globe and ensure some sort of interoperability
from across the globe! Then either the entire globe has to become anglais
which again is problematic. the Hindis will stick to hindi, the Arabs to arabic
and french to french, japanese to japanese and chinese to chinese and so
on. We need a system such that the interpretation in the various languages
is automatic.
I believe that having a new tags in HTML will greatly help in having multilingual
support.
The new tag <langcode> will give a twelve digit alphanumeric code.
It will be closed by </langcode>
When there is no equivalent <nolangcode alt="123456789abc" native="french">
which will mean that there is no langcode for this text. the nearest equivalent
code is given and the native language or the language in which the text which
has no langcode was written. this can be closed by </nolangcode>
numbers inside the texts could be written by <langnumber> closed by
</langnumber>
Say the alarm tag is "Converter Temperature High 175.25".
In french it may be "Temperature du converter haut (or grand) 175,25" {Note
that since i could not get the accent signs in My linux m/c, the text is basically
incorrect in french, but does convey the message}
And somewhat different in German, spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Marathi and the
thousands of languages across the globe.
Now suppose the server or WEB PLC gives a message indicating the langcode
say for example
The browser could have the related messages for the codes stored in the
language used in the particular PC and the message could be displayed in
the relevant language.
Detailed explaination of the working:
A standards committee like say the W3C makes the langcodes. The body establishes
a comprehensive list of codes for common sentences in every language.
The table has the following columns:
A langcode column as a primary key,
The language which represents the exact meaning for this langcode,
The languages columns which store the meaning for the langcode in that language,
like englist(us), english(uk),french, german, hindi,arabic, persian and so
on.
the browser stores the langcode in the machine. The webtraffic is limited
to transmitting langcodes. The browser interpretes the langcode in the native
language. The user sees the text in users own native language.
There are of course limitations that not every phrase could be covered,
but such messages can be written with code <nolangcode alt="abc213456789"
native="english"> No bhai there is no anglais code for this</langcode>
Where the user sees the message in english "No bhai there is no anglais
code for this"
followed by "nearest Equivalent: There is no English equivalent" in native
language.
The browser now has to play a critical role, of converting whatever the
user types to equivalent codes for transmitting. And on reciept to reconvert
the messages back to text.
Anand
-- Visit www.smbd.org
for
Free Tutorials, Source Codes and Other stuff.