[Journal] Translation of the journal

[Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo)]

On 28-May-07, at 1:49 PM, Paul Kelly wrote:
>> Another problem may occurs, an encoding problem. Hopefully, files  
>> seems
>> encoded in utf-8 so it is good to manage langage specification.
>
> It is my understanding that all LaTeX files use ASCII encoding.  
> Accented characters are encoded using escape sequences such as \'e  
> for é, \^a for â, \"o for ö, \cc for ç and so on. So there would be  
> no need for managing encoding - all the source files can just be  
> kept as ASCII.

Hi Paul, thanks for speaking up.  This make sense to me and is sort  
of what I thought, but the I'm pretty new to the whole text encoding  
world.  Yves, I guess using this method for accented characters is  
likely the most complex thing a translator would have to do (other  
than maintaining other latex-specific code).  How do you feel about  
it - manageable?  The good thing is that OpenOffice's Export->LaTeX  
option will convert to the special encoding sequences automatically!   
I don't know how perfectly it works, but it seemed to do it for me.

> And that would also make it easy for all the typeset final versions  
> in different languages to all be generated by the same person,  
> somebody who would have special responsiblity for that and could  
> ensure quality control - I think that it seems important to have an  
> official "source" of the newsletter rather than different language  
> versions being generated by different people - I feel there is a  
> danger there that the translated versions could be regarded as only  
> "semi-official" if they are not published from the same source as  
> the English version?

This is one of the reasons why we chose the Creative Commons, By  
Attribution and No Derivatives licence.  So that we would really have  
some measure of control over the translation process.  Of course, I  
don't expect all the initial editorial team to be able to handle the  
additional workload - having more people involved will really help,  
as long as they engage with our Journal translation process.

>> And that would also make it easy for all the typeset final  
>> versions in different languages to all be generated by the same  
>> person

Could you elaborate on what you mean here?

Thanks again,
Tyler