On 5/30/12 12:04 AM, Bernhard Eversberg wrote:
>
> It transpired that a first draft of a German RDA translation exists.
> For reasons unknown to me, no one outside very small circles has
> yet been able to read it.
Note that because the RDA data elements have been published in the Open
Metadata Registry, translation of the display data into German is taking
place there. Here's an example in the RDA Content vocabulary:
http://metadataregistry.org/concept/show/id/511.html
The potential here is that the machine-readable RDA would use a single
identifier for each data element and vocabulary term, but these can be
rendered in systems (both for input and user access) in the language of
choice. This is, as many would point out, analogous to us all using MARC
tags, which are not language-based. The particular advantage of the
registered elements is that they are in a machine-readable form and
available for sharing, so the translation only has to be done once and
can be used by others. This could be helpful for libraries serving a
multi-lingual user community.
This facility could also be used to get us around the problems of "same
general language, different usage" -- such as the "color/colour"
question. The ISO 639 language codes can express dialectical differences
such as that between UK English and US English. What we don't have yet
(but it seems that as we begin to use this we will want to invent) is a
way to indicate usage within a language but for different communities or
purposes, such as providing different displays for children's libraries
vs. adult libraries, or different displays for different specialties
(music, art, maps), or different displays during the cataloging process
vs. the end-user display.
I don't have any information on the relationship -- or potential
relationship -- of the terms in the registry and the German translation
of RDA. I hope that the registered elements will be used in the
machine-readable data because that would facilitate sharing of bib data,
in the same way that MARC/UniMARC has.
kc
--
Karen Coyle
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