Re: CHARSET and LANGUAGE

[Paul Hill <phill@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I have been a lurking on the ietf-calendar list for awhile, mostly because I do
n't
at this time deal with programming event/scheduling/calendar issues, but I thou
ght
I'd jump in with a few comments on language.

Firstly FWIW, language codes are defined in ISO3166. My examples below do
not use those codes (i.e. ES for Espaņol, EN for English).

David Madeo wrote:
> Having said that, there are lots of cases where even if you don't understand
> the spoken language, you can get by with alternate means.
>[...]
> So I'd agree this is important and useful.

Okay, so let me offer the following list of possible scenerios and those writin
g
the standard can work out how the standard covers or does not cover these examp
les.

1. A river trip in the wilds of Idaho where the language is English.

#1 is simple enough.

2. A ski week in Switzerland with guides availage in French, English, German et
c.

The difference between 1 and 2 is that #2 includes many languages.

3. An Opera in Italian with supertitles in English (?, around here they project
 them on a little
strip _above_ the stage or hanging from the balcony etc.)

#3 has a single secondary language, but #2 has many primary languages

4. An Opera in Italian with Spanish, French, English available through a 'littl
e
digital display'

#4 points out the need for a list of secondary languages and hints at a 'delive
ry
method' attribute.

5. An international conference where the Calendar entries have all been transal
ated
into various languages, so forget about guessing from the title (because
a particular calendar received a particular transalation), but the user would w
ant to
know that the speaker is giving the talk in Catalan, but there will be a simult
aneous
French and Spanish translation. This would be different than the proceeding of
the
conference being published in French, English, Spanish and German (I assume the
languages of the proceedings are outside of this standard, but maybe not, see
next example)

#5 shows that the language of the calendar entry is no indication of what
will happening with the primary and any secondary languages of the event.
There is a real DIT/DOT distinction (see discussion from last week)
going on here.

6. A board meeting of an American cooperation in L.A. where the presentation ar
e
in English only, but printed versions of the talks are available in Japanese.

Hopefully, #6 is nearly the same as #3, with only the possible description
of the form of the secondary language.

(I'll leave out the scenerio of #5 that include "a presentation from Latin Amer
ican division
President in Spanish". That could get us into an example of two primary languag
es
and one secondary)

The multi-lingual conference and the vacation week with multiple languages avai
lable,
both seem like real, but complex enough possibilities that would be good to
cover.

-Paul