Internationalization Webseminar Announcement

Is your software global-ready?

- Can it be efficiently translated into multiple languages?
- Can it support Asian languages?
- Can it work in multiple date/time formats or handle address, phone number and other information that will vary worldwide?

Not sure? This interactive two-hour online course is definitely right for you then. Join us for a live WebSeminar and learn how to make internationalization - the process of adapting source code to support worldwide locale requirements - a smooth effort and avoid iterative, pernicious, and expensive delays to global releases and revenue.

WebSeminar: Global-Ready Applications / Programming for the World

Please email webseminars@lingoport.com for information on a GALA discount.

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).

Web 2.0 is defined many ways, but one simple definition is “the era when people have come to realize that it’s not the software that enables the web that matters so much as the services that are delivered over the web.”
The social networking and blogging phenomena appear by my estimation to be dying down and losing their appeal as web business models since everyone has exhausted and copied what you can do with sharing information with your friends and making new friends. The trend seems to be toward creating little online applications using existing client-server technologies or API (Application Programming Interfaces) provided by other toolmakers, like making a site that shows you where all the good beer is in town http://www.beerhunter.ca/ or plotting your jogging routes http://www.walkjogrun.net/ or sharing travel information in a journalistic, collaborative way travbuddy.com through Google’s maps API.

Borrowing from a couple of “Top 10 Web 2.0 Innovations” lists, I have attempted to examine some of the applications/websites in terms of their potential for future localization.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking tool. Everyone shares favorite URLs with their friends, so why not make a website where you can share your Favorites with the rest of the world? Yahoo! recently purchased it, and although Yahoo! isn’t as localized as heavily as Google, they obviously have an interest in markets beyond their front door. It stands a fairly good chance of becoming a localized application, or perhaps the similar existing Yahoo! application http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/ will be.

netvibes.com is a personalized page to display your favorite newsfeeds, shopping alerts, weather alerts, etc. It looks to me an awful lot like my customized my.yahoo.com page, only the content is aggregated from any RSS source. I wasn’t especially impressed with it, but it bears mentioning because it is one of the only Web 2.0 apps I could find that has bothered to make an attempt at localizing its interface. If you click on the languages at the bottom of netvibes’ homepage, you will still see most of the content in English, obviously, because the sample aggregation is pulling in English newsfeeds.

flickr.com was cited as a top Web 2.0 app of 2005, even though it has been around for a while longer than just last year. Photosharing is pretty hot stuff with a lot of people, and flickr has an appealing interface. As an aside, I think that online digital photo-sharing is preferred by the hipper younger crowd, and am not sure why companies like HP continue to market photoprinting devices so heavily to this target market. Flickr is another cool web app purchased by Yahoo!, and I look for its interface to be localized in the next year or so. Native English-speaking people aren’t the only ones who take digital photos and share them with each other.

Looking for a light, online word processing tool that you can easily use to collaborate with other users? You have quite a few choices, and I predict that Google or Yahoo! will have an entire office suite of online applications in the not-so-distant future in an attempt to compete with each other as well as anyone else who makes an office suite. In the meantime, there are several online word-processing applications springing up : writely.com, writeboard.com, rallypointhq.com, zohowriter.com. The last one mentions multilingual support, i.e., you can write in your "mother tongue", however, once again, the portal and the interface are English-only.

In a similar vein, a few "online project management" suites have sprung up: basecamphq.com, centraldesktop.com, sidejobtrack.com. Once again, every single one of them has foregone the option of localizing the interface.

Like the multitude of blogging tools that came before them, these apps are used by multilingual users everywhere. It seems obvious to me that companies developing an application to be used by the entire world would pause to consider that most of the online world consists of non-native English speakers.
If you click through blogger.com’s random-blog button, you discover that there are probably more bloggers writing in Portuguese or Spanish. Yet, after more than five years of existence, Blogger still has no localized user interface whatsoever. As an aside, Blogger happens to be owned by Google, which is highly praised for its localized site. However, looking past its search interface and the machine translation tool for websites, Google has failed to localize most of its tools http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/.

Hopefully, the case will be different for the more robust online applications that are popping up everywhere. The decision to localize a web application interface doesn’t involve the level of investment risk it once did. A successful web app localization requires a relatively small investment yet will dramatically increase use and exposure in major non-English language markets.

If the thin-client, online software trend continues (the bulk of the data processing occurs on the server rather than client-side) and isn’t simply a fad of online application gadgetry, then all of our beloved office tools will move completely online. At some point, this will have implications for the translation and localization industry, in terms of how files, translation memories and projects are managed, and how collaboration takes place across the globe on translation projects. Of course we already see this to some degree, but will this increase, or even become the norm? How do you see the technologies of Web 2.0 affecting/being used by the localization industry, if at all? Are we all going to be “Linked In” as one hive, translating mind?

However, the more pressing question as to how this new trend of applications relates to the translation industry is, why are so few of them being localized?

Further reading:
http://www.web2con.com/
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
http://www.web20workgroup.com/
http://webservices.sys-con.com/read/172417.htm
http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/Top-10-Innovative-Web-2-0-Applications-of-2005/10891
http://web2.wsj2.com/the_best_web_20_software_of_2005.htm
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-6031272.html

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……..

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.