From: Eivind Tagseth (eivindt@multinet.no)
Date: Tue May 04 2004 - 02:46:18 CDT
* Charles Lindsey <chl@clerew.man.ac.uk> [2004-05-03 11:48:26 +0000]:
> In <20040502090406.GC14188@tagseth-trd.consultit.no> Eivind Tagseth <eivindt@multinet.no> writes:
> > o "In re" is mostly used in english-speaking contries, other countries
> > will want a localized variant. The "Re: " prefix cannot be perfectly
> > translated to another language as it is impossible for the reading
> > agent to know for certain that "Re: " really is a back-reference at
> > all times.
>
> But nobody is proposing to translate to or from "Re: " in a header that
> has already made its way out onto the network. Whatever came out of the
> followup or posting agent is what will arrive at the reading agent, and is
> what the reading agent should display. If the Subject started with "Re: ",
> then a good reading agent will ignore that "Re: " if/when it needs to
> compare Subjects, whereas it is unlikely to ignore "Sv: ", "RE: ", etc.
As a Norwegian, I don't want to see a back-reference like "Re: " in front
of the subjects. "Re: " has no meaning in Norwegian. Therefore I'd want
my newsreader to replace that "Re: " into "Sv: " before displaying it
to me. The problem is that I would only want to have "Re: " translated
like this when it was used as a "back-reference", and it is impossible
to tell for a reading agent if "Re: " is a "back-reference" or just
part of the unstructured subject input manually by the user.
Eivind