Multilanguage Internationalization The language is not enough

1
Multilanguage -Internationalization -The
language is not enough

• Michio Kimura M.D. Ph.D.
• Director and Professor of Medical Informatics
  Department
• Hamamatsu University School of Medicine
• JIRA DICOM Committee Advisory

2
Three types of representation-- We have 2
patient names in HIS

• Alphabetic
• Ideographic
• Phonetic
• Ideographic names
• have many ways to pronounce
• are difficult to sort

3
Multi-Byte Character Codesin Use in Asia

• Korea KS X 1001, and 1001 annex 3
• Hanguls(phonetic) and Ideographics
• China(PR) GB 18030-2000
• Taiwan(ROC) CNS 11643, and Big-5
• Japan JIS X 0208-1997
• Katakana, Hiragana(Ph.) and Ideographics
• Junior school pupils must read/write 810 letters.
• Varieties 6879(JIS) to 48711(CNS)

4
Byte-wise Representation of ISO2022
5
RFC 1468 Japanese Character Encoding for
Internet Messages

• ISO-2022-JP
• Within 7-bit, safe for most nodes
• Every line starts/ends with ASCII
• No carryover shifting
• ISO-2022-KR is also used in Korea
• Same method is in DICOM(Supplement 9), and HL7
  v.2.3.1

6
UNICODE ISO10646

• Allocating 2 bytes for every character, UNICODE
  can represent every character in the world
  without any status nor shifting technique.
• 16 bits65,536
• -gt CJK unified ideographics

7
CJK Unified Ideographics
8
Why we do not use UNICODE as Message? (I know it
is used inside, but, we do not like it go outside
as message format.)

• If Chinese Bone and our Bone are to be
  recognized same, because of symmetry, how about
  using these?
• UNICODE consortium says Introduction of Language
  information.
• We cannot write Chinese language textbook
  written in Japanese.
• We cannot accommodate Koreans living in Japan
  with their name properly in Korean letter, but
  their address is Japanese, of course.
• Original UNICODE dream is gone.

9
HL7 Japans answer to HL7 v.3

• In XML, UNICODE will be default in 2003.
• Even in UNICODE v3.1, over-unification problem
  is not solved.
• But with XML schema and XML namespace, font
  information can be set in each tag.
• By this, Korean name in Japanese address can be
  described.
• Original UNICODE dream (all languages in the same
  time) is gone, but many 1 byte languages one 2
  byte language is not bad.
• Pokémon
• Answer UNICODE can be default, provided that we
  can continue to use each local practice now being
  used.

10
Language representation is not the only issue

• Language used in
• Conversation with patients
• School education
• Medical, Nurse, Technicians
• Medical record
• Signs and symptoms
• Reports
• Structure of data types
• Address
• 250 Wu-Hsing street
• 1-20-1 Handa cho