Hello Fellow listers,

I have been thinking of making the tiny browser SCADA put up at www.smbd.org http://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

<langcode> abc123456789 <langnumber>175.25</langnumber></langcode>

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