[MPEG-OTSPEC] [EXTERNAL] New AHG mandates and other news!

[Peter Constable]

This thread appears to have drifted entirely away from OpenType / OFF hence is getting way off topic for this list.


Peter

From: mpeg-otspec <mpeg-otspec-bounces at lists.aau.at> on behalf of William_J_G Overington <wjgo_10009 at btinternet.com>
Date: Thursday, May 13, 2021 at 3:13 AM
To: 'MPEG OT Spec list' <mpeg-otspec at lists.aau.at>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] [MPEG-OTSPEC] New AHG mandates and other news!
To "'MPEG OT Spec list'" <mpeg-otspec at lists.aau.at>



Hello Peter


Thank you for taking the time to explain. I appreciate your help.



> But it isn’t really practical from a linguistic perspective. It assumes that semantic propositions can be defined that can always be used as translation pivots between two arbitrary languages, and that those can be formulated independent of any larger discourse context.



I was unfamiliar with the term "translation pivots" as such.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_language



However, upon investigation I found that I a> m familiar with the concept, just not under that name.



> It’s also not scoped: Adapting examples from your slides, I might want to send a message to the hotel saying, “If my dog has hair rather than fur, and doesn’t shed, will I be able to keep my dog in your hotel rooms?” There are an unbounded number of semantic propositions someone might want to communicate in your hotel scenario. There’s no clear way to scope.



Yes, exactly.



I have long recognised that. I have always been suggesting that localizable sentences can be used for communication through the language barrier in some particular circumstances. I have not advocated the invention for every possible use.



The slide presentation is about finding information through the language barrier after a disaster. I opine that the invention would be good for that application.



This limitation of not encoding every possible sentence is applied upon in Chapter 10 of my first novel.



http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/localizable_sentences_the_novel_chapter_010.pdf



However, emoji cannot depict every possible image that can exist, yet emoji are being encoded for some pictures.



Also, clip art cannot depict every possible image that can exist, yet clip art collections can be useful.



I have used clip art. For example in the slide presentation that we have been discussing.



>> I am just told that it is 'out of scope'…
> That’s because Unicode is an encoding for _characters / text elements_, not semantic propositions.

Thank you for explaining.

Yet what about U+1F91F?

https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-13.0/U130-1F900.pdf

There are glyphs for the localizable sentences. There seems to me to be no reason why sequences to use those glyphs interoperably with those sequences including tag characters could not be reasonably formally accepted into regular Unicode, thereby providing robustness and formal encoding in a non-proprietary manner such that they could be used without problem or uncertainty as to provenance or intellectual property rights by any individual or organization that chooses to use them.

It would seem that adding a note in the code chart explaining the meaning and its context would not be unreasonable.

Now maybe I am wrong about that, and there is some reason of which I am not aware.

However, I opine that the way to settle the matter is to have that formally and fairly assessed by the Unicode Technical Committee, with reasons given if the idea is refused.

That would seem to be the fair way and the professional way to do things.

For example, the sentence "It is spring." would have the context of "A season of the year".

I remember at one stage, though not now, an online translation facility translated into French "It is spring." to "C'est source." as in a spring of water from a hillside rather than "C'est le printemps." as desired. So the context is important as a guide to the human translator producing a sentence.dat file.

> If the idea is that the display strings for a the set of localizable sentences is resident in the receiving device, then that’s an instance of something that is frequently done: it’s very common for software running on devices to have access to lots of static strings to display messages to a user. However, fonts are not the storage mechanism used for such strings, and software vendors definitely would not want to start using fonts as a new way to store static strings for user-interface messages.


So maybe the way to do localizable sentences is to use the following format that I devised. The format is such that it uses a text file that can be produced using the Microsoft WordPad program. WordPad is bundled with the Windows operating system so is widely available without needing to use additional software to produce or study the file.


http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/The_Format_of_the_sentence_dot_dat_files_for_use_in_Research_on_Communication_through_the_Language_Barrier_using_encoded_Localizable_Sentences.pdf


http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/localizable_sentences_research.htm


William Overington


Thursday 13 May 2021



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.aau.at/pipermail/mpeg-otspec/attachments/20210513/10035241/attachment-0001.html>