ActiveMath
Translation tools requirements
Translation tools are many… but what good are they? To my surprise, there’s always some folks that find a tool that sounds cute but then it never helps. Let me try to identify the hard questions of translations’ management:
- workflow of updates (by developers) and management of translators’ contributions
- recognizing context when translating phrases
- managing translation duties for documents and phrases
The fancy conclusion? No tool I’ve met really helps any except the management of duties and generally they do so by making completely impossible the others.
A Content-dictionary is a social thing
You know what?
A content-dictionary as can be found by tons on http://www.openmath.org/cd/ is mostly a social artifact. It’s a set of descriptions of symbols so that one can mean what others means.
did anyone say notation needs context?
It’s not really new that mathematical notation is made there to be abused so as to be most efficient for the current context. But I just met an extreme case:
In the OpenMath3 and MathML3-content efforts, we are polishing the description of symbols’ so that they can be common. Discussion about using linear syntax appears, of course, and an extreme case about the need for context was just posted by James Davenport:
