On 3/9/2018 6:58 AM, Marcel Schneider via Unicode wrote:
As of translating the Core spec as a whole, why did two recent attempts crash even before the maintenance stage, while the 3.1 project succeeded?
Essentially because both the Japanese and the Chinese attempts were conceived of as commercial projects, which ultimately did not cost out for the publishers, I think. Both projects attempted limiting the scope of their translation to a subset of the core spec that would focus on East Asian topics, but the core spec is complex enough that it does not abridge well. And I think both projects ran into difficulties in trying to figure out how to deal with fonts and figures.
The Unicode 3.0 translation (and the 3.1 update) by Patrick Andries was a labor of love. In this arena, a labor of love is far more likely to succeed than a commercial translation project, because it doesn't have to make financial sense.
By the way, as a kind of annotation to an annotated translation, people should know that the 3.1 translation on Patrick's site is not a straight translation of 3.1, but a kind of interpreted adaptation. In particular, it incorporated a translation of UAX #15, Unicode Normalization Forms, Version 3.1.0, as a Chapter 6 of the translation, which is not the actual structure of Unicode 3.1. And there are other abridgements and alterations, where they make sense -- compare the resources section of the Preface, for example. This is not a knock on Patrick's excellent translation work, but it does illustrate the inherent difficulties of trying to approach a complete translation project for *any* version of the Unicode Standard.
--Ken
