Hi Tim,
Following what I briefly mentioned in the e-Biosphere, here I describe it to hopefully make it more comprehensive.
Now we TaiBIF are doing data cleaning against our specimen data, one of the tasks is to separate information written in different languages. Take 'Locality' as an example, if an attribute is 'Taipei 台 北', we move '台北' to a separate column named 'LocalityInChinese'. (Considering easiness for data providers, we decided to use 'InChinese' instead of 'zh_TW'.)
Then you see several descriptive elements in Darwin Core could have their counterparts in Chinese, like Collector, Identifier, and many others. To be used by regional data providers, IPT will be even better if it can handle multiple languages. Actually we had thought about just keep all languages in one place, but I am afraid that it might create problems when information is exchanging worldwide.
As I am aware that language issues could lead to further discussions of the standard, I, therefore, propose a neutral mechanism that users can add their own elements, so that once an element is created, it can automatically map to the column with the same name, when a SQL source is connected or a csv sheet is uploaded. There should also be statistics based on the new element, or users can decide they don't want it calculated. In this case, I would add 'LocalityInChinese' as the new element.
Hope this make sense.
Cheers,
Chih-Jen(Burke)