The actual requirement in RFC 8126 doesn’t say the public specification needs to be in English, but it does say that “the designated expert will review the public specification.” This suggests that whatever language the authoritative specification might be posted in, the designated expert needs to be able to understand it and/or the WG would need to designate an alternate expert able to review it appropriately.
Obviously, given that the IETF works in English, an authoritative English-language specification makes that easier to achieve. But a translation, even one hosted by a responsible body, almost always contains verbiage that only the original language is considered authoritative. From: TLS <tls-boun...@ietf.org> On Behalf Of Watson Ladd Sent: Monday, August 19, 2019 11:05 AM To: TLS List <tls@ietf.org> Subject: [TLS] On the difficulty of technical Mandarin (SM3 related) Dear all, I see no reason why English alone should be accepted for standards documents we reference. French and German pose few difficulties, and one can always learn Russian. What I don't know is how difficult Mandarin is at a level to read a standards document. I expect the mechanics of using the dictionary to dominate. I'm concerned about the traceability of unofficial Englidh PDFs on some website: could the Chinese body responsible host them instead? I fully expect this to be a more general IETF problem. Sincerely, Watson
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