Hi,
another track could be that the language ids are extended, and you
have e.g. (taken from the http://nl.ijs.si/elan/ corpus):

<language id="sl-en">Translation from Slovene to English</language>
<language id="en-sl">Translation from English to Slovene</language>
<language id="sl">Slovene</language>        <!--SLAVIC-->
<language id="en">English</language>        <!--GERMANIC-->

An objection would be that the processing software couldn't easily
know that 'sl-en' is in fact 'en'; but if you add a corresp (sameAs?),
e.g.

<language id="sl-en" corresp="en">Translation from Slovene to English</language>

then the complexity for processing an element marked with @lang 
is only a little greater:

<xsl:if test="@lang=$lang or id(@lang)/@corresp=$lang">...</xsl:if>

I didn't test the above, so I can only hope it actually works..
Still, I can see the objection that this would break generic
stylesheets that rely on the lang attribute indicating the actual
language of the element.

Best,
Tomaz


<
Peter Flynn writes:
 > On Wed, 2006-01-04 at 15:36, Lou Burnard wrote:
 > > Peter Flynn wrote:
 > > 
 > > >>I think the only way to do this cleanly with P4 would be to add a <note> 
 > > >>to the <notesStmt> saying something like "Translated from the Spanish" 
 > > >>or whatever.
 > > > 
 > > > 
 > > > In the P4 interim, though, I need a machine-identifiable location (eg
 > > > an element or an attribute) for the language code, to assist in the
 > > > machine collation of the corpus.
 > > > 
 > > 
 > > hmm... how about
 > > 
 > > <note>Translated from the <name xml:lang="es">espa&ntilde;ol</name></note>
 > 
 > That would certainly do it, although it's already clear from other text
 > that it's a translation. I just need something like source="es".
 > 
 > ///Peter