Re: multilingual tags

["Dotan Cohen" <dotancohen gmail com>]

On 14/09/06, Bengt Thuree <bengt thuree com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-09-14 at 09:59 +0200, Thomas PARIS wrote:
> > I was explaining how I'd like to have multilingual tags, to which Dotan
> > replied:
> >
> > On Thu Sep 14 at 01:46 (+0300), Dotan Cohen wrote:
> > > I think that it's a great idea. My personal website is also bilingual,
> > > so having the tags in two languages would be very nice indeed.
> >
> > It would, wouldn't it?
> >
> > Unfortunately, I'm no so sure anymore this is allowed by the spec. After
> > looking around a bit, it seems I'm the only one interpreting it that
> > way. So I'm putting this on hold, for now. And maybe forever :(
>
> I thought XMP allowed multiple languages...
> But perhaps RDF do not, or?
>
> /Bengt


The way I see it, XMP allows multiple languages, but not multiple
versions of each individual tag. So, you could have the tag (for
non-Spanish speakers: perro is dog in Spanish) "dog" and the tag
"perro" but you would have no way of associating the two.

A workaround would be to assign to each tag a random identifier that
is stored in the tag but not shown in the interface. The same
identifier could be used for each language, and to store the language
code, in the tag. So the actual tags would be "7484567::en::dog" and
"7484567::sp::perro". When Fspot in in English mode, it would use the
tag marked "en" and in Spanish mode would use the tag marked "sp".

Another workaround would be to just have both languages in the same
tag, like this: "en::dog::sp::perro".

Both workarounds allow for more than two languages, should the user be
so inclined. A solution would have to be drawn up as to what to do
with tags that are labeled in only one language. I could provide ideas
on that, if none are presented here.

Dotan Cohen