multi language support

[Thomas H. Hahn]

To turn the issue slightly around: one of the aspects of multi language
support
in browsers is in fact the monolinguality of our cataloging systems. I did a
survey at the UW Madison general library system in February this year, trying
to establish the number of languages represented by the material in our
collection (of roughly 5.5 million items). The number of languages (or,
rather:
scripts) I was able to establish was 356, with about 1200 items being
non-conclusive. The majority of these scripts are alphabetical, but not
necessarily of the Roman alphabet. So everything is romanized nowadays
(Hebrew,
Slavic, East Asian, Pali, Sanskrit etc.), or downloaded in its romanized
version only from RLIN/OCLC, which means it is in fact _reduced_ to a
monolingual status in terms of not only the title display, but also in
terms of
the information that _could_ be obtained were the records being entered and
displayed (and thus searchable) in the original script.  
I wonder if anybody else ever has ever undertaken such a statistical count of
materials versus languages/scripts.  For me the findings provided fudder to
lobby for lanaguage extensions in the library systems themselves, not only in
any given browser.  Success with this lobbying so far was rather limited, I
must admit. However, with UniCode and XML it has to be given new consideration
now, I believe. 

regards

Dr. Th. H. Hahn
East Asian Bibliographer
thahn at macc.wisc.edu
thhahn at facstaff.wisc.edu
http://www.library.wisc.edu/guides/EastAsia/




At 10:32 AM 10/8/99 -0700, you wrote:
>> But in IE, some languages do not work well and make a lot of problems. In
>> Netscape, many language shareware or freeware  are available.
>> When you "turn
>> on" the software, it translates the page for you. Some of those
>> features do
>> no compatible with IE.
>
>The only time I've ever dealt with other languages (i.e. Character Sets) and
>IE was with a page in Hebrew which I do not read or speak. The user I had
>said it looked great after the auto-download and install.
>
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