[MPEG-OTSPEC] Many to many substitution and localization

[William_J_G Overington]

John Hudson replied.
 
Thank you for replying.
 
John Hudson wrote as follows.
 
> You are proposing breaking something that already works in order to 
> make it work in a more convoluted and less useful way.
 
I am not proposing breaking anything, I am suggesting an additional 
facility.
 
I do not purport to know much about localization. So maybe I have got it 
wrong.
 
So I will try to explain my thinking and readers can decide whether this 
is a new idea, and if so, what they opine about it and about my 
suggested new layout feature becoming added to the font standard.
 
Around 2009 there was lots of discussion about whether to encode emoji 
each as a character in ISO/IEC 10646.
 
I wondered what else could be encoded as a character.
 
Letters, digits, punctuation, spaces, symbols - some of each of those 
had been encoded.
 
"What about whole sentences?" I thought.
 
So I did a thought experiment.
 
Consider a sentence such as "It is snowing.".
 
Suppose that that sentence is encoded as a character.
 
So someone who wants to send the message "It is snowing." can 
look up the character, maybe from a printed list, or in a menu in an 
email program, and send it in an email to a friend.
 
The friend can then find the meaning of the character, or a computer 
system can decode it automatically, and the message "It is 
snowing." becomes known to the friend.
 
Yes, it could be done, but it is not of any use.
 
I then realized that the decoding by or for the friend need not be into 
the same language, so the received message could have gone 
("tunneled") through the language barrier.
 
Oh!
 
So the encoded character was a localizable sentence.
 
Not localized. But localizable.
 
So the significance of what I am suggesting is that the localization is 
at the receiving end of a communication, not at the sending end.
 
So in the scenario that is in the slide show, the link repeated here for 
convenience,
 
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/slide_show_about_localizable_sentences.pdf 
<http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/slide_show_about_localizable_sentences.pdf>
 
Albert does not need to know the language in which Sonja works.
 
Extending the simulation, Sonja can be sending out localizable emails to 
various people in various countries and upon receipt each email is 
localized into the language being used by the person at that location.
 
So this suggestion is based on my opinion that that would be good to be 
able to do. I do not know if it can already be done.
 
The only system of which I am aware that uses code numbers that can be 
used to send precise information through the language barrier is SNOMED 
CT a clinical terminology system, though the code numbers are not only 
for that purpose, they are used for accurate recording of clinical 
records within a country.
 
William Overington
 
Tuesday 1 October 2024
 
 
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