Localization Enablers

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Localization Enablers
Swaran Lata, Director slata_at_mit.gov.in
Technology Development for Indian Languages
(TDIL) Programme Department of Information
Technology, Ministry of Communication
Information Technology Govt of India
Elitex-2008, January 17, 2008
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Globalization of IT
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GLOBALIZATION
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• Focus of National Knowledge Commission of India
• The National Knowledge Commission focuses on
  the objective of
• transforming India into a knowledge society.
  
• It has concentrated five focus areas of the
  knowledge paradigm
• Access
• Creation
• Concepts
• Application
• Services
• Information Technology applications , services ,
  tools and resources based on natural language
  processing techniques would be key enabler for
  the above five knowledge paradigm.

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Local Area Portals for Gloabalizing local
knowledge digitize earlier existing communities
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Internationalized application to be Localized
Localized Application
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Quality Assurance

• Testing methodologies
• Metrics for Linguistic Testing
• Certification by Government for
• linguistic compliance

Language Technologies
Training

• Machine Translation
• Optical Character Recognition
• Speech Technologies
• Cross Lingual Information Retrieval

• Certified Localization professionals
• PG Specialization in Localization
• PhD Programmes

Locale Data

• Presentation of dates, times, numbers, lists, and
  other values.
• Collation and sorting
• Alternate calendars, which may include holidays,
  work rules, weekday/weekend.
• Currency
• Tax or regulatory regime

Standards

• Encoding Standards
• Multimodal input device standards
• Fonts Rendering Engines
• Transliteration Translation

Education Outreach

• Guidelines
• Best Practices
• Case Studies
• Consultancy
• Showcasing of Tools
• Technologies

Localization Tools

• Project Management
• Translation Memory
• Translation Tools
• Natural language for text processing parsing,
  spell checking, and grammar checking etc
• Automatic Testing Tools

Shipping issues
Linguistic resources

• Minimizing Time lag
• Benchmarking w.r.t. English version
• Political sensitivity
• Pricing issues

• Parallel Corpora
• Speech Corpora
• Lexical resources
• Ontologies
• Dictionaries
• Thesaurus
• Reference Terminologies

The Tree of Localization Complexities
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Guidelines for enhancing the Localizability

• Design and develop information and applications
  in a way that meets the needs of the
  international user
• Design that allows for easy localization at the
  point of need
• Means to reduce the cost and length of
  localization
• Checklists grouped by task, and supported by
  backup examples and explanations for example
  Browser feature applicability charts
• What browsers and browser versions supported
  which i18n features (eg. ruby, bidi, utf-8, Lang
  attribute, lang, white-space handling,
  writing-modelr-tb, etc, etc.) This would help us
  implement pages that used the most up-to-date
  internationalization features appropriate to our
  audience without the pain of trial and error (or
  perhaps more likely erring too far on the side of
  caution).
• Use of constructs in existing markup languages
  (eg. (x)HTML) to either enable interoperability
  in a globalised system or improve the
  localizability of data for example avoid the use
  of deprecated tags of HTML

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• I18n considerations applicable to document and ui
  design also includes such things as navigation,
  screen space and layout, implementing graphics,
  creating source text, designing interoperable
  systems, choosing and implementing fonts and
  complex script rendering, multimedia design,
  handling data format conventions, supplying data
  for translation/localization etc
• For example Standard Icons
• Allowing for regional variation for point to a
  list of (or link to) country/language site
  selections
• Text based approaches can be problematic in two
  ways
• they may not be understood - that's often why you
  are going to the selection list (eg. how would
  the average American find the 'global sites' link
  on a page in Arabic or Japanese - not made up
  examples!)
• they may make the user feel like his/her needs
  are secondary.
• Separation of localizable data from style sheets
  and templates for example use of CSS for
  separating presentation aspects from the content
  while designing websites.
• Guidelines focussing on content development, DTD
  design and stylesheet development relating to
  implementation in XHTML, XML, XSL, XSLT, CSS,
  XForms, SVG, and other similar specifications.

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• Guidelines for developing internationalized DTDs
  such as
• white space handling, use of markup vs. Unicode
  control characters, use of alternative content or
  entities for different markets, provision of meta
  data to describe document structure for
  localization tools, provision of information
  about available space and other aspects of
  content affected by localization, the ability to
  tag terminology and semantics within content
• Language Tags
• rfc3066 for 'language tagging' in XML and HTML
  has inherent difficulties in distinguishing
  between language and dialect, as well as
  historical variations. To devise a way of
  expanding the language tag concept to adequately
  cover the locale and script oriented needs of the
  localization community, incorporation of markup
  to support international script features (such as
  ruby and Arabic directionality)
• Internationalization tag set
• Develop a set of tags that others could use for
  creating DTDs
• In the form of a namespace for inclusion in a
  schema, or simply a partial DTD and set of
  recommendations.
• Methodology for identifying non-translatable
  content for automatic identification by the
  localization tool

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Internationalized data formats

• Time and date formats are just two of many ways
  in which people represent the same or similar
  information differently. Other examples include
  numbers, currencies, temperatures, weights,
  dimensions, addresses, telephone numbers,
  personal names, paper sizes, etc.
• It would be great if there was a way of capturing
  this information in a non-culturally-specific way
  and rendering and (more difficult) recognising it
  automatically in a culture-specific format, that
  could be used by people implementing web based
  communication - be it web page forms or exchange
  of information between machines.
• The work involved in this is not trivial, but it
  is desperately needed. Whether the W3C should
  attempt to produce this or work with others to
  achieve it is for discussion, but either way I
  believe it would be very useful.

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