multilanguage -internationalization -the language is not enough michio kimura m.d. ph.d. director...

Multilanguage -Internationalization -The language is not enough

Michio Kimura M.D. Ph.D.Director and Professor of Medical Informatics DepartmentHamamatsu University School of MedicineJIRA DICOM Committee Advisory

Michio Kimura M.D. Ph.D. Hamamatsu University School of Medicine

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

AlphabeticIdeographicPhonetic

Ideographic nameshave many ways to pronounce are difficult to sort


Multi-Byte Character Codesin Use in Asia

Korea: KS X 1001, and 1001 annex 3 Hanguls(phonetic) and Ideographics

China(PR): GB 18030-2000Taiwan(ROC): CNS 11643, and Big-5Japan: JIS X 0208-1997

Katakana, Hiragana(Ph.) and Ideographics Junior school pupils must read/write 810

letters.Varieties: 6879(JIS) to 48711(CNS)


Byte-wise Representation of ISO2022


RFC 1468: Japanese Character Encoding for Internet Messages

ISO-2022-JPWithin 7-bit, safe for most nodesEvery line starts/ends with ASCII

No carryover shiftingISO-2022-KR is also used in KoreaSame method is in

DICOM(Supplement 9), and HL7 v.2.3.1


UNICODE: ISO10646

“Allocating 2 bytes for every character, UNICODE can represent every character in the world without any status nor shifting technique.”

16 bits=65,536 -> CJK unified ideographics


CJK Unified Ideographics


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.


HL7 Japan’s 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.”


Language representation is not the only issue

Language used in; Conversation with patients School education

Medical, Nurse, Technicians Medical record

Signs and symptomsReports

Structure of data types Address

250 Wu-Hsing street1-20-1 Handa cho

multilanguage -internationalization -the language is not enough michio kimura m.d. ph.d. director...

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