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
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