Internationalization (I18n) Workgroup

The TEI Guidelines may be thought of as having two parts: the running prose of the chapters (usually referred to as the Guidelines) in https://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/index.html and the documentation of element and attribute definitions to be found in the appendices (the “Specifications”). Translations of the Guidelines into different languages have been attempted in the past, but with limited success, as it is a huge and hard-to-measure job. The Specifications have been the usual target for translation efforts, and there is some infrastructure in place for keeping track of when translations of these need to be updated.

In October 2019 a group drawn from international experts met at the Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute hosted by Duke University Libraries to discuss the topic of “Communicating the TEI to a Multilingual User Community” (https://trianglesci.org/2019/07/17/communicating-the-tei-to-a-multilingual-user-community/). A direct result of this effort was an invitation by the Mellon Foundation to submit a proposal for project funding to implement various steps that were identified as addressing this need of the TEI community.

The first and vital step to proceed with the internationalization of the TEI is the establishment of a dedicated Working Group on “Internationalization (I18n)”. The initial members of this Working Group are Susanna Allés Torrent, Helena Bermúdez Sabel, Hugh Cayless, Martin Holmes, Gimena del Rio Riande, Luis Meneses, Kiyonori Nagasaki, Satoru Nakamura, Kazuhiro Okada, Martina Scholger, Yifan Wang, and Raff Viglianti.

Deliverables

During the initial phase, the Working Group will focus on the continued development of introductory materials in (at least) Spanish and Japanese, and will make sure they are clearly visible to users from the TEI website.

• Develop internationalized and localized landing pages for the TEI site. While a complete translation of the website into a variety of languages is probably unrealistic, having custom landing pages is very achievable. The internationalized introductions will be accessible from the pertinent landing page.
• Develop a multilingual glossary of TEI terminology for both translators and users. Previous attempts by members of the working group to translate the TEI’s documentation inevitably led to questions about the meaning of some terms in English. Sometimes this process should flag the need for edits to the source to improve their clarity, at other times a note explaining why a particular word was chosen for a concept would make it clear that a precisely equivalent translation is unnecessary (or perhaps impossible). The glossary can be used for a variety of additional purposes, like (e.g.) pop-up definitions of TEI-specific vocabulary.
• Develop a curated repository of multilingual and multicultural examples. A translation of the TEI introductory materials to other languages would benefit significantly from not just giving examples of encoded texts, but also demonstrating how they can be used. A repository of examples would serve as a source for both the introductory materials and the Guidelines, and could start to address some of the issues we have around translating examples. There is also the issue that TEI documents have both a text (the source being encoded) and a “frame” (the metadata, attribute values, etc.). The text and the frame may be in different languages which our current system for identifying the language of examples isn’t sophisticated enough to handle.

Upon successful completion of this working plan, the working group plans to transition to a Special Interest Group (SIG), which will provide a venue for community members with needs and experience around multilingual TEI to come together and to develop tools and workflows to lower the barriers to translation in order to expand the scope of languages served by the TEI.

Contact:

• Hugh Cayless, hugh.cayless@duke.edu
• Martina Scholger, martina.scholger@uni-graz.at