Subject: Transliteration standards

From: [email-masked] (John Clews)
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 1997 14:11:07 GMT

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 ([email-masked]) and a related
Web site <http://www.elot.gr/tc46sc2/list/>.

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 [email-masked], 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

        [email-masked]

with this message in the body of the text:

        subscribe tc46sc2 [email-masked]

(but with your real email address replacing the string [email-masked]).

To find out further commands you can use, send the command "help" as the text
of an email either to [email-masked] or to: [email-masked]
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 [email-masked] 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 [email-masked] 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: [email-masked]
Harrogate, HG2 7PG, United Kingdom      *     telephone: +44 (0) 1423 888 432