If you are new to software localization and visit the web sites of software tool vendors, they will tell you that What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) is an extremely important feature. We all know it is important for desktop publishing. WYSIWYG editing eliminates the need to print a flyer again and again to see how changes look. But why is WYSIWYG important to software localization? [Read More on The Localization Tool…]

The Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) version 1.0 has just been published as a W3C Recommendation. You can read the W3C press release.

ITS is a set of attributes and elements designed to help in the internationalization and localization of XML material. It can be used externally to the documents (a bit like the “DTD Settings” file in Trados), and it can be integrated within the XML documents themselves.

The ITS 1.0 Specification can be found here: www.w3.org/TR/its

You can find extensive examples, descriptions and links to implementations of ITS on the ITS Working Group page: www.w3.org/International/its.

The next step for the Working Group is the publishing of the “Best Practices for XML Internationalization” which is currently a Working Draft.

The Last Call Working Draft of the Internationalization Tag Set has been published.

Along with it a new document the Best Practices for XML Internationalization has also been published as a First Working Draft.

I would encourage anyone who develop translation tools that provide support for XML to review the ITS Specification document. Part of the specification addresses some of the XML localizability issues, offering a common way to specify localization information:

• what should or should not be translated,
• some terminology identification mechanism,
• identification of inline codes and sub-flows,
• localization notes,
• and more…

You can use Bugzilla to point out issues and provide comments. The review period lasts until June-30 (6 weeks).

Following the heels of Trados 7.1 upgrade in late December there seems to be an upcoming release, SDL Trados 2006, some time in March. This release is about bundling the Trados Workbench and SDLX products, making them available together and according to proz TGB, at a price level comparable to each of the former CAT tools separately. The fact that SDLX does not appear in the name of the product seems to suggest that the SDLX brand will be the one that eventually will phase out.

So it seems that finally SDLX and Trados will be soon merging functionalities more seriously, but at this pace of releases, I wonder if we are in front of a shift to a rent-a-CAT model, with upgrades every few months, almost a subscription!

Regarding the tools themselves, what I liked from SDLX was how it simplified things for the translator and what I liked from Trados was the scalability (in terms of response time) of their translation memory engine. What I disliked from SDLX was the little annoyances here and there of its features, which IMHO needed more testing before release and, from Trados, the feature-stagnation of the translator’s front-end. I’m anxious to see the outcome from this upcoming merger of tools. I’m also anxious to learn about the few CAT alternatives that are said to be in the pipeline, and that should hit the market over the next few months.

ITS (http://www.w3.org/TR/its/) is a set of elements and attributes that supports the internationalization and localization of schemas and XML documents. This first draft addresses the following type of information (called data categories in the document):

• translatibility
• localization information
• terminology
• directionality
• and Ruby text

For example, ITS provides attributes to identify within your XML document parts that should not be translated, or words/phrases that should be treated as “terms”, as shown below:

<para>
And he said:
You need a new <span its:translate='no'
its:term='yes'>motherboard</span>.
</para>

Each data category can be used in schemas, in-situ (within the content), or dislocated (defined somewhere else than where the corresponding content is located). XPath is used to provide all the scoping mechanism.

I think it is important for the localization and translation tools vendors who are not part of the ITS working group to provide feedback on this draft, so the final version of ITS can be well-suited for their applications. You can send your comments to www-i18n-comments@w3.org. Use Comment on its tagset WD in the subject line of your email. The comments archives are publicly available.

In the localization tools market there are a number of organizations which deliver various localization and translation tools.

They all focus on specific areas of localization which in general has been driven by the localization needs of clients at the time they were designed.

As soon as documentation translations became a requirement the tools to enable translations of this type of material started surfacing.

In general the same applied to software localization tools and localization project management applications which have been designed and released following the huge demand to be able to control the localization process in better way.

Based on your requirements you will find that the commercial available tools will fit a number of more or less independent groups.

o Tools which will handle your Software localization requirements.

o Other tools which will take care of your Documentation localization requirements.

o Tools which will handle the project management side of your localization projects.

o Tools which will limit the translation cost by reducing documentation source material, and the typical single source
publishing tools which are available in a number of different flavors.

o And the tools which will focus on Machine Translation.

Depending on the organizational structure and translation requirements your will find that in most of the cases the difference in translation requests can’t be covered with just one tool.

The functionality and file type support is not matching your requirements, so it will become clear that if you decide to purchase you’ll need at least two or more tools to handle your projects.

As a result a number of large corporations decide to figure out if there would be a possibility to design and develop localization software internally and fill the caps between the commercial tools available on the market, and the requirements they had internally.

Many organizations have followed this path and have build tools varying from simple batch files on one side to highly complex and fully integrated localization solutions on the other side.

But what are the drawbacks of that approach ?

Wouldn’t it be much easier to discuss your requirements in the BLOG and let us (Tool Vendors) know all about it ?

We may be able to deliver the Solution……..

In the past, we were very reluctant to make generally available some internal tools that we used internally, but a couple years ago we decided to give away as freeware a couple of tools that were very important in our process: Xbench and Comparator.

Since ApSIC is a localization provider for Spanish, our greatest concern was that our direct competitors would benefit from them for free, but it turned to be the other way around: our competitors are more reluctant to use our tools than anyone else!

We discovered that, in fact, releasing freeware had many upsides for our own performance as a language provider. Those who develop your internal tools know that normally internal tools are smart, but consistently quick and dirty in the execution. They are very vaguely documented - if at all - and the interface often needs to be demoed to new users so they get started with it.

By releasing freeware, we have been able to make great improvements in performance, documentation, and ease of use for the tools that were very important in our process. This effort translated into either many saved hours and/or more quality for the outcome of our employees and vendors.

If we had not released them as freeware, we probably would still use them, but they would not be as fast, clear and ready for our own users.

Another great benefit was that since both Xbench and Comparator are tools for quality-oriented people (in the areas of extreme consistency and traceability respectively), the e-networking achieved supporting them has been also very positive, as also valuable were the bugs or suggestions reported by the community of users.

Currently, we continue to enhance these tools and plan to continue releasing updates to them with additional functionality in the future.

If you also develop in-house tools, I encourage you to consider the freeware channel as a way to raise the bar of your own tools. The instant benefits are great improvements in your own process, more visibility both from your clients and resources, and who knows, maybe the tool can eventually become or be part of a commercial offering, or ‘grow up’ as an open source tool if it happens to make business sense.

A little word on a new initiative announced at the GALA meeting at Seattle last week:

ENLASO has released a first set of implementations of components and tools in the Okapi Framework. You can download them freely as they are open-source software. There are a few screen shots available.

In short, the Okapi Framework is a set of interface specifications, format definitions, components and applications that provides an environment to build interoperable tools for the different steps of the translation and localization process.

The idea driving Okapi is that during the course of a localization project, one need often to write small utilities that perform specific tasks. Developing such little programs within an organized framework can make a big difference after a while since you can start re-using a lot of the components you have already made. Doing this within an open-source project makes also sense because you can re-use components other peoples have made.

The core of the framework is a set of object interface definitions that allow the components to communicate. For example: the Filter interface, the FilterItem interface, and the UtilitySet interface.

The first set of components include few things but provides a foundation upon which new components are being build:

• There is a filter for PO file and a utility set that provides three functions: Text extraction (in RTF, XLIFF, TMX, and table format), Text merging (for extracted XLIFF), and Text rewriting.
• There is also Tikal. It’s a simple command-line tool that run launch any utility, and do various things like editing utility options and filter parameters files.
• And finally there is Olifant (early Alpha version). That is a program to manage TMs. More on it later.

The next release of the components is coming soon. It will include a Properties file filter, an Encoding Conversion, and a Line-Break Conversion utility, as well as some enhancements to the existing utilities.

So, next time you need to write a little program for a localization tasks, try to see if the Okapi Framework can help you out.