At risk of being pedantic, though I suppose being so is my bread and
butter, nobody argued "already biased" was a *good* translation of
bereits bestimmten, only that it was clearly supposed by the translator
to *be* the translation of the German phrase in the cited passage. All
the proposed markups (whether the German is encoded as a gloss, term, or
annotation) assume that the German is somehow connected to the
translator's specific English usage, and I don't see anything else that
could be the target. If the German doesn't have any specific target in
the English, then the problem is really bizarre. In that case (or if one
really doesn't want to guess what words the German is translating), the
only solution is to treat the thing as an annotation, since notes are
commonly encoded without any explicit indication of target other than
their own location. If one is willing to hazard a guess, however, then
the term : gloss method allows you to recognise that some kind of
translation relationship exists between the two phrases (though it does
seem to get it backwards), and provides you with a target to aim the
gloss tagging at.

As to the second question, TEI P4 describes the "lang" attribute as
identifying "the language of the word or phrase marked" (I got this from
the description of the <foreign> element [see
<http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/ref-FOREIGN.html>], but I believe it is
consistent throughout. Using it to describe the language of the gloss,
term, or annotation as "German" seems to me to be consistent with this.
I wonder if your informant is thinking of the fact that the attribute
value of the lang attribute is an IDREF and needs to be declared in the
header using nested <langusage> and <language> elements; I believe in
TEI P3 you also had to give the name of a writing system declaration
file in the langusage declaration (hence the bit about script?). This
seems now to be optional and the whole area is up for grabs in P5. I
believe their is some way of indicating that your actual encoding is in
a language other than English, but don't know how to do that. I think it
involves the TEIFORM attribute and modifications to the dtd.

Cheers.
-dan

Martin Mueller wrote:

> A comment and a question.
>
>First, whatever "bereits bestimmten"  means, "already biased" cannot
>possibly be a proper translation (I'm German). "Bestimmt"  is probably a
>very odd pun, hovering between "determined," "harmonious," and "tempered"
>(in the musical sense). But "already biased"  seems to miss the boat on all
>possible counts.
>
>Second, I'd like to know about the lang attribute.  I've been told that the
>lang attribute tells you about the encoding script rather than the language.
>But Michael uses the lang attribute to say that this passage is in German.
>
>Now both my informant and Michael know what they're talking about, and both
>of them like to forthright about their views. Are both of them right?
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) public discussion list
>[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Michael Beddow
>Sent: Wednesday, September 10, 2003 10:37 AM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>
>
>><sample>
>>In the Stabreim, again, poetic speech has an infinitely potent means
>>of making a mixed sensation swiftly understandable by the already
>>biased (bereits bestimmten) Feeling; ...
>></sample>
>>
>>
>>
>
>I'd be inclined to encode this as
><p>...
>In the Stabreim, again, poetic speech has an infinitely potent means of
>making a mixed sensation swiftly understandable by the already biased <note
>lang="de" type="L1" resp="tr" place="inline">(bereits bestimmten)</note>
>Feeling;...
></p>
>
>You might consider the parentheses to be renditional, as italics would be,
>if used here.
>
>[I refrain, with some difficulty, from commenting on the quality of the
>translation, since that's off-topic and beyond remedy.]
>
>Michael Beddow
>
>

--
Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD
Associate Professor of English
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4
Tel. (403) 329-2377
Fax. (403) 382-7191
E-mail <[log in to unmask]>
Home Page <http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/>