I quickly
reply to inquiry below as complements to the clients:
Price quoting/estimate
Price negotiation
Revision of translation
Localization
Minor change
Short translation
Immediate question
Idiom
Technical terms
Computing
HTML coding
Reading Thai
on Japanese web browser:
TISI
is hoping to get the ISO/IEC 8859-11 (Latin/Thai) approved. I am not aware of
the results/progress of the ballot -- it seems that TISI has voted YES but I am
not sure. The 8859 series contains a collection of character sets for which can be used in the 8-bit processing environment and present
a bilingual character space: English and another non-latin
language. This would be very similar (but not the same) as the TIS 620.
In
the past, all members of the 8859 series were automatically
adopted by the MIME standard and pre-registered with the IANA. I think
it is reasonable to expect the 8859-11 to be included in the next revision of
the MIME standards, this won't take place until MIME
needs a revision.
In
order to get Thai support throughout the Internet, either 8859-11 or TIS 620
should be registered with IANA.
But actually, there is no need to wait until the next
revision of MIME.
TIS
620 can be registered today should someone would like
to do it.
The
requirements are:
(a)
There must be a well defined specification in English
published on the Internet,
(b)
There must be an RFC which describes the use of the charset
(see Greek, Chinese/Japanese/Korean, Hebrew, etc),
(c)
The draft RFC must be submitted for discussion in the IETF-charset
(or something like that) mailing list.
I
will discuss the way to read Thai web pages and email or news messages using
Netscape 3 (NS3), Netscape 4 (NS4) and Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 (IE4), on
a non-Thai Windows 95 or NT system (I use both in their UK edition).
Neither
NS nor IE really supports "standard" Thai. NS does not have a
well-defined mean to allow the web server specifies the Thai character set
and/or language. The use of "User-defined" charset/font
is less than convenient. IE supports MS proprietary encoding
"Windows-974" but TIS 620 nor ISO 8859-11. Way to go, M$ )-; not that they are not aware of TIS 620, they simply
don't use it.
Worst
of all, there is no general agreement among the Thai language
user community what kind of character set/language tag/MIME encoding
will be used. Right now, although most web servers and web browsers are using
the "ignorant-but-simply-working" approach by assuming everyone knows
that the text is Thai and knows how to switch their browser to Thai fonts. This
leave Thai documents in a vulnerable position that search engines are
incorrectly index Thai content and turn Thai web documents into meaningless
long bitstreams.
Mails
coding to read Thai:
Strictly
speaking ASCII is a seven bit character code and there
are no "remaining space". Internet mail as specified in RFC822 was designed to use seven bit ASCII only, and MIME is an
effort to change that problem (among other things). To be able to use the Thai
character set with MIME you need a suitable identifier that says to the
receiving mail reading program that the data is characters coded with this Thai
standard.
The
way to do this is to register a identifier with IANA
(The Internet Assigned Names Authority) character set identifiers starting with
"X-" are reserved for experimentation, so you could use something
like X-Thai to get a working system.
If
I understand things correctly IANA will only register the charset
name if there is a standard that defines it or it is described in a RFC (the
kind of document that define how the internet should work).
Three things not to do are:
1.
To send Thai characters as eight bit mail without using MIME.
2.
Use an X- charset for widespread usage. X- names are for experimentation
and shouldn't be avoided in "production usage"
3.
To use one of the charset identifiers already
registered for other eight bit character sets.
All
these three things will lead to confusion and inoperability.
Japanese
language structure:
They
have pronouns. Watashi", "atashi", "watakushi",
and "boku" all mean
"I/me". "Anata"
means "you". But they usually omit first- and second-person pronouns,
unless it's necessary for clarity.
For
example:
Nani o
kaimashita ka. (What did [you] buy?)
Hon o kaimashita. ([I]
bought a book.)
When
you watch subtitled anime and you actually hear a character use his/her own
name (other than to introduce themselves), they might
be doing it to be cute. In some cases it might be
because the character isn't very fluent in Japanese ("Tarzan hungry. Jane
feed Tarzan.").
If
the subtitles have a character using his/her name instead of I/me, but you don't* hear them saying their name, it may be the
translator's attempt to convey the character's unusual speech patterns. For
example, "Watashi wa hon o kaimashita" literally means "I bought a
book", but including the pronoun sounds a bit strange to native Japanese,
so the translator might decide to convey this by substituting the character's
own name: "Sakura bought a book".
Internet Is Great for "Knowledge Workers"—But Only
If They Really Know Something
[Excerpts from writing of Steve Vitek]
For
the most part, the Internet has created a better world for technical workers
("knowledge workers"), including translators of patents from
Japanese, German and other languages. It provides an invaluable reference tool
for us when we are not sure what term to use, if we can only figure out where
the right sources of information are and how to search for information in those
sources. And most of the work that needs to be
translated is available for downloading for free on the Internet.
The
Internet also provides an important direct link between freelance translators
and their clients. As one patent lawyer told me when I was identifying Japanese
and German patents at a law firm in the Silicon Valley: "Good, experienced legal
secretaries, researchers, and technical translators are very valuable to us
because they can save us a lot of time and money". In many cases, we can find our
customers in databases available for free online if we
know who we want to work for and if we can offer them the services they need.
It costs me about 250 US dollars a year to be listed in two national and three
regional directories of translators that maintain searcheable
databases of translators online: the ATA (American Translators Association)
directory and directories of translators in Northern California, New York,
Washington D.C. and Prague. Potential customers can also access websites of
individual translators online if we make it easy for them to find us. The cost
associated with creating and maintaining a website is again quite reasonable,
normally just a few hundred dollars.
One
of the places where the microcosm seems to converge with the macrocosm is now
clearly the Internet. It is estimated that by about
the year 2005, the number of people who are connected to the Internet will
reach one billion and most of the new digitally literate surfers will come from
developing countries. It is a pretty safe guess that
instant access of so many people to patents will provide more high-octane fuel
for the fire of human inventiveness. The word patent, which comes from the Latin expression litterae patentes,
i.e., open letters or public documents, is now regaining its original meaning
online.
The ubiquity of the Internet is thus slowly shifting the balance of
power in the translation business away from brokers who simply resell stuff,
all kinds of stuff, without necessarily knowing much about the stuff that they
are selling, to specialized service providers who are able to provide added
value because they know a lot about the product that they are selling.
