From tempo@sesame.demon.co.uk Mon Mar 10 15:22:52 1997 Received: from sesame.demon.co.uk (sesame.demon.co.uk [158.152.125.29]) by dkuug.dk (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id PAA12565 for ; Mon, 10 Mar 1997 15:15:50 +0100 Date: Mon, 10 Mar 1997 14:11:07 GMT From: tempo@sesame.demon.co.uk (John Clews) Reply-To: tempo@sesame.demon.co.uk Message-Id: <11701@sesame.demon.co.uk> To: chinanet-tech@sdsc.edu, i18n@dkuug.dk, ccirn@fnc.gov Cc: apng-all@apng.org, lhl@cs.wisc.edu Subject: Transliteration standards X-Mailer: PCElm 1.10 Lines: 118 Transliteration standards I am the chair of the International Organization for Standardization subcommittee responsible for transliteration (ISO/TC46/SC2: Conversion of Written Languages). As a committee, with associated working groups, ISO/TC46/SC2 next meets in London from 12-14 May 1997, at the Headquarters of BSI (British Standards Institution). The current working groups are as listed below, although expansion beyond this to include other scripts will also be under consideration at the May 1997 meeting. WG: Current scope: ~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ WG1: Transliteration of Cyrillic WG2: Transliteration of Arabic WG3: Transliteration of Hebrew WG4: Transliteration of Korean WG5: Transliteration of Greek WG6: Transliteration of Chinese WG7: Transliteration of Japanese WG8: Joint SC/SC4 Working Group: Relations between transliteration and machine representation of characters WG9: Transliteration of Thai WG10: Transliteration of Mongolian WG11: Transliteration of Persian Despite all the work on ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode, there will always be a need for transliteration as long as people do not have the same level of competence in all scripts besides the script used in their mother-tongue, and may have a need to deal with these languages, or when they have to deal with mechanical or computerised equipment which does not provide all the scripts of characters that they need. People are now begining to realise that transliteration may have more indirect impact on other aspects of multilingual computing than they had previously realised. A mailing list and Web Site for ISO/TC46/SC2 The secretary (Evangelos Melagrakis from Greece) and I now intend to make transliteration and ISO/TC46/SC2 far more visible and far more relevant to end users than it has been in the past. To enable this, ELOT (the Greek national standards body) has set up an electronic mailing list for ISO/TC46/SC2 (tc46sc2@elot.gr) and a related Web site . We hope this list will attract researchers and scientists who can add useful information which might assist in developing standards on the Conversion of Written Languages. We also hope to have an emphasis on issues of using computers to do appropriate transformations necessary in automated transliteration, and also look forward to having regular contact with those on this list who are interested in such issues. There are quite a few with an interest in transliteration in library catalogues on the list, but there are other potential users of transliteration too. There are now over 240 subscribers to tc46sc2@elot.gr, from 41 countries and territories which indicate the worldwide interest. One major advantage of email is the ability to involve far more people in the development of a common purpose than were involved before, to get user feedback, and expert opinion from various sources. Subscribing to the mailing list for ISO/TC46/SC2 In order to join the list, send an email to majordomo@elot.gr with this message in the body of the text: subscribe tc46sc2 your@email.address (but with your real email address replacing the string your@email.address). To find out further commands you can use, send the command "help" as the text of an email either to tc46sc2-request@elot.gr or to: majordomo@elot.gr To unsubscribe, send the command "unsubscribe" instead, omitting the "quotes" marks in both cases. This will tell you how to obtain copies of past messages etc., and other useful features. Once you are subscribed, you can send messages to tc46sc2@elot.gr and receive messages from other members of the list. Please reply where possible to the list as a whole, so that all can benefit: using the Group Reply function (pressing G on some email software) is the simplest way to achieve this. Other members will also be interested to see who else is joining the list, so it is useful to send a brief introduction (say, one or two short paragraphs) to tc46sc2@elot.gr at the outset, saying what languages, scripts and other things you are involved in. That is the most likely way to stimulate others to write on the subjects you are interested in! You should also inform your national standards body to express your interest in participating in this list. I can provide some information on details of your national member body of ISO, if you send me an email requesting this. I look forward to seeing new participants on this list. Please feel free to forward this to anyone else who may be interested in transliteration standardisation issues, and to send any queries about the list to me. Yours sincerely John Clews -- John Clews (Chairman of ISO/TC46/SC2: Conversion of Written Languages) SESAME Computer Projects, 8 Avenue Rd. * email: Converse@sesame.demon.co.uk Harrogate, HG2 7PG, United Kingdom * telephone: +44 (0) 1423 888 432