First Language Standards Summit a Success

Kim Harris, text & form Software-Lokalisierung GmbH

The Summit was a huge success. It brought together some of the most influential and active minds within various user communities and organizations in Europe and North America to discuss current language standards and their role in our industry. The list of participants included not only buyers and sellers of language services, but also representatives from organizations such as ISO and OSCAR, government agencies in Europe and North America, and universities in the United States, Japan, and Europe. The conference format provided participants with a working platform to openly exchange information and opinions on the implementation of existing standards and the need bring some of the current development efforts together.

The concept of holding a forum to discuss language standards is not new; however, the return on past efforts has often been disappointing. Many have become highly commercialized gatherings of salespeople with their own agendas, sponsors who buy slots to pitch their wares, and people like myself who no longer attend for the content, but go to mingle. That is, of course, not to say that all of the seminars and presentations at the various events throughout the year are not noteworthy—there have certainly been a number of excellent, highly memorable presentations in the past—but their number is diminishing, and they are slowly becoming a rare breed. While these events serve an important purpose, it is not to further the discussion of standards issues.

A few of these events have become “client-only” or “vendor-only” forums that seem to defeat the purpose of universally accepted standards and an industry-wide discourse on trends, technologies and other significant issues that touch the entire industry. The objective should be to bring all relevant parties together to discuss solutions and develop standards and processes that benefit the entire community, not to divide them into separate peer groups that shy away from contact with each other.

It was time to try something different.

At the Annual GALA Meeting in Bonn in 2004, the GALA board had attempted to motivate the members in attendance to form workgroups for various topics, one of which was quality standards. This group consisted of six or seven people, including myself, Hans Fenstermacher, and Don DePalma. While the group itself did not continue its work on quality standards in its original form, the members did continue discussing a potential roundtable that would bring a selected group of people together to discuss quality and standards in a non-commercial environment. Don DePalma, Summit Chairperson, brought conference organizer Barbara Jarzyna on board and the rest is proverbial history.

It was not easy trying to convince stakeholders in our industry to participate in this no-name event, run by a former Unicode conference organizer and a bunch of idealistic language standards advocates. We had no financial support from the outside; everything was funded by the registration fees alone. Despite this publicized lack of sponsors and external funding, the issue of profit and the question of who gets “all” of the money were among the Top Ten Questions Asked. One has to wonder where this skepticism originated.

Our expectations were exceeded and our fears proven unfounded. The Summit was exactly what many had been waiting for: A hands-on, interactive forum to discuss standards, as many as would fit in two days. We covered good ground, received excellent feedback from the participants, and really talked to each other about some of the issues with which we are confronted. Perhaps the size of the group made a difference—of the sixty people in attendance there were a only handful who didn’t express an opinion—but that shouldn’t deter newcomers from participating next time, just be prepared to do some standards work, and have a great time doing it.

More information including the agenda and presentations can be found at http://www.internationalization-conference.org/languagestandards/index.html. The next Language Standards for Global Business conference will be in Barcelona May 29-30, 2006.

Kim Harris is the Managing Director of text & form Software-Lokalisierung GmbH.