Re: comments on draft-ietf-sming-reqs-02.txt: I18n

[David Harrington <dbh@enterasys.com>]

Hi,

This topic has been raised multiple times in the IETF. Fred Baker made
it very clear that documents must be written in English, the language of
the IETF. Maybe that will change under the new leadership, but it hasn't
changed yet.

I strongly disagree with i18nized DESCRIPTIONS, or any other element of
the language that could impact the interpretation of the specification. 

There should be one and only one language that is the standard for the
official specification, and the IETF has declared that English is that
language. I have no objection to somebody publishing a translation into
other languages, but there should only be one official specification in
the one official language, in case translation creates ambiguities.
Otherwise interpretation and interoperability suffer.

dbh

"Durham, David" wrote:
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Juergen Schoenwaelder [mailto:schoenw@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de]
> > Sent: Friday, June 29, 2001 12:08 PM
> >
> >
> <snip>
> >
> > 71: We believe that 4.3.18 should be "nice to have". See also the
> >     comments in Appendix A.
> 
> [Dave] Saying Internationalization would be nice to have seems to be an
> innocuous change. Any objections?