Standards News

LISA Teams with Unicode and IBM to Improve CLDR

February 2008: In order to support the UNICODE Consortium in its goals of providing high-quality localization-related information, LISA is teaming up with IBM corporation to submit and review data for Unicode’s Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR, http://www.unicode.org/cldr) project, which collects and provides data such as date/time formats, numeric formatting, translated language and country names, and time zone information that is needed to support globalization.

LISA invites experts in localization to contribute to the CLDR for languages and countries with which you are familiar. Participation in the project requires only a small investment of time and energy (usually one-three hours per week), but the input provided will assist many developers in globalizing their applications properly and in meeting local business needs.

Individuals who actively contribute to the project may be eligible to receive LISA individual membership (€425 value) as a token of our thanks and recognition of their contributions. Individuals who feel they could assist in this project are invited to contact Arle Lommel at arlego@lisaaway.org for more details.

TMX 2.0, SRX 2.0 Soon to Be Released

February 2008: After two years of development, TMX 2.0 and SRX 2.0 are near completion. Both represent major updates to these standards and have incorporated large amounts of feedback from the user community and tools developers. Keep an eye out here for more details soon.

OSCAR TBX Under Consideration as an ISO Standard

LISA’s industry standard for the exchange of terminological data, Term-Base eXchange (TBX), was submitted to Technical Committee 37 (TC37) of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for consideration as a potential ISO standard. TBX was accordingly adopted as a new work item by TC37, ISO 100342. Initial balloting held in 2007 received sufficient votes for adoption, but it was agreed at the TC37 meetings in August, 2007 in Provo, Utah that TBX would be revised and resubmitted to respond to substantive comments from various national member bodies and liaison members. Accordingly a task force consisting of Kara Warburton (IBM and Standards Council of Canada) as editor, Alan Melby (Brigham Young University and ANSII) and Arle Lommel (LISA) was set up to revise the standard. The revised standard is to be resubmitted to ISO TC 37 in February 2008 for reconsideration.

OSCAR Ratifies xml:tm as LISA Standard

The xml:tm specification was officially adopted by OSCAR as a standard in February 2007. xml:tm provides content creators a way to embed “author memory” (text and translation memory) data directly in XML documents, simplifying the transmission and maintenance of this crucial data. xml:tm was designed to work with existing standards such as TMX, XLIFF, and DITA, to provide a seamless solution to localization needs within an end-to-end XML content creation environment. For more details please visit the xml:tm page.