Hi, My thought on this.
On Fri, Aug 23, 2002 at 01:50:19PM +0200, Gerfried Fuchs wrote:
> * Tomohiro KUBOTA <tkubota@riken.go.jp> [2002-08-14 16:33]:
> > I'd like to use "entity expression" to write their names. Though
> > usage of Unicode would be the best way, it would force writers and
> > translators to use Unicode-supporting text editors. For example,
> >
> > zhaoway --> 赵蔚 (zhaoway)
> >
> > May I modify these names in DWN articles?
>
> Sorry for my late response, but I'm just questioning what the advantage
> for the users might be? Those reading the English pages usually don't
> know what to do with the names in kanji, those who know kanji usually
> don't read the English pages anyway and/or should be happy with the
> "translated" names nevertheless.
I initially thought your argument to be correct since I live in USA.
But then I thought about following scenario and changed my mind slightly.
1. Many Japanese can not read Chinese (for example me).
2. If Chinese name is only referred in "romanized" form, I have no way
to tell what those romanized form pronunciation corresponds to each
Chinese character and I have no way of knowing who they are. (I tends to
read and remember Chinese name with my way of pronunciation.)
3. Japanese translation page prefer to have original Chinese Character
in document since we Japanese tends to identify name of a Chinese person by his original form in Chinese than English pronunciation.
This similar situation can happen even between European languages. Name
character translation is not one-to-one function which can provide
unique inverse function :)
> This is my personal opinion, maybe others don't share it and I'm just
> an ignorant but I don't think that the kanji charactered names on the
> English (or any other language version beside the kanji ones) would gain
> much from it....
Most modern system can display all these Unicode, amazingly (X4 of
course but also including Windows.)
> Don't get me wrong, I put it in in the german translations although I
> don't personally see much sense in it. Would be interested what others
> think about it....
There are few separate issue here. I think following is practical thing
to do.
1) Inclusion of Unicode data in web page ----- Yes to this.
2) Inclusion of Kanji data to English source page in a form incompatible
to plain old 8 bit clean editor ------------ No to this.
3) Include kanji data as a 赵蔚 --- Yes to this. (I thought
HTML support Unicode entry by code number.)
So entry shall be:
bra bra bra zhaoway (赵蔚) bra bra bra ...
This will serve everyone. Unless we do this, it becomes unmanageable.
(Sorry Kubota-san, I know it is pain to input by Unicode number but
forcing Unicode will cause more trouble than needed, IMHO.)
--
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Osamu Aoki @ Cupertino CA USA, GPG-key: A8061F32
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