ISO TC 1 Standardization Association of Sinitic Languages and Han Characters

SASIL

Technical committees

Rationale

Technical committees are divided by function, not dialect or language.

Technical Management Board

  • Management of technical committees

Technical Committee: Transcription, transliteration and Romanization systems

  • Romanization systems (Jyutping, etc.), systems for names

  • Transcription systems (e.g. Cantonese transcription in Han characters)

Technical Committee: Writing systems

  • Punctuation

  • Segmentation of words and word writing conventions

  • Pedagogical grammar standardization

Technical Committee: Characters and words

  • Variant forms of characters (異體字)

  • Variant forms of words (異體詞)

  • Dialectal characters (方言字)

  • Character sets (e.g. HKCLS 和諧體)

  • Strokes, components and shapes, order

  • Dictionaries, thesauri, and corpuses

Technical Committee: Pronunciation

  • Readings of characters

  • Readings of words

Technical Committee: Terminology

  • Terminology in all fields (per language)

  • Every field has a Workgroup, e.g. IT terminology workgroup, medical terminology workgroup.

  • Online multi-lingual concept/terminology database (e.g. https://www.geolexica.com)

Technical Committee: Technology

  • Human computer interfaces

    • Intelligent input methods (e.g. white spaces between words)

  • Computer representation of Sinitic transcription/transliteration systems

  • Ontologies

Technical Committee: Education

  • Language proficiency tests

  • Styles of academic formats in Chinese (e.g. MLA and APA in English)

  • Citation formats

  • Templates of various business and governmental communication (letters, etc.)

    • Letters

    • Notices/circulars

  • Standard vocabulary and grammar for education levels

  • “Simple Chinese” (incl. for addressing a Cantonese audience)

Technical Committee: Cultural

  • Examination of legal language usage in light of practices in other countries

    • (e.g. 中華人民共和國國家通用語言文字法)