I18n (was Re: [Koha-devel] From the Kaitiaki)

[Ambrose Li]

Hi,

On Mon, Sep 16, 2002 at 01:13:53PM -0400, Andrew Arensburger
wrote:

>       I'm not an i18n guru by any means, but I do have books
> in English, French, German, and Russian. I can think of a
> number of issues to think about:

Neither am I an i18n guru by any means, but I'll comment on what
I know.

>       - If I look up a French book, it'd be nice to have the
> author and title appear in proper French, with all of the
> accents in the right places.
>       - A multi-lingual book might have titles in several
> languages, e.g., "English-Russian Dictionary" also has the
> title "Anglo-russkiy slovar'" (except that the latter would be
> rendered in cyrillic, which I won't do in email). It should be
> possible to search for either one.

This is also the case in "my" library. Because Koha will support
MARC, this problem is partially solved (e.g., the existence
of the "246" tag; we use a subfield inside "245" to encode
parallel titles, but that breaks down when the book has three
titles e.g., Chinese, English, and French).

>       - For that matter, a book might have several variants of
> the title in multiple languages. Terry Pratchett's "The Colour
> of Magic" is published in the US as "The Color of Magic."

I think Koha will have no trouble handling this if the backend
is MARC-compliant and the frontend allows all the various MARC
tags to be edited. I may be wrong, though.

[...skipped...]

>       A critical analysis of =|es|iso8859-1|Don Quixote|= and
> some similar notation for indicating variant (but equivalent)
> forms of a title:
> 	=|en_GB|iso8859-1|The colour of magic|=
> 	=|en_US|iso8859-1|The color of magic|=
> (Obviously, this can be used for authors, notes, etc., and not
> just titles.)

Perhaps someone conversant with MARC may be able to tell us
whether and to what extent MARC already handles these situations?
I think title is partially solved, but I don't think MARC has
mechanisms to handle multiple languages for authors and notes etc.
so Koha would have to handle them itself.

-- 
Ambrose Li  <a.c.li at ieee.org>
http://trends.ca/~acli/  http://www.cccgt.org/

DRM is theft - We are the stakeholders