[Madrid] Expression of interest

Reinhard Schäler

Director, Localisation Research Centre, University of Limerick, Ireland

 

Topics most interested in: Localisation and Policy Making

 

Proposed contribution

 

The Multilingual Web, Policy Making and Access to Digital Knowledge for All

 

Reinhard Schäler

Director, Localisation Research Centre, University of Limerick

Reinhard.Schaler@ul.ie

www.localisation.ie <http://www.localisation.ie/>  

 

Who is developing and implementing standards? What is their rationale? Who
awards them the authority to do so? Are current policies satisfactory and
who do they serve? How can standards and interoperability initiatives
support efforts to make access to information and knowledge in your
language, for all, a reality?

 

This contribution will offer the results of a short survey into standards
and interoperability initiatives in localisation and internationalisation.
Current efforts and organisations will be described and analysed providing
participants of this workshop with a thorough introduction to the field.

 

Standards in our industry are developed by different organisations for
different reasons following different procedures most of which can be mapped
against a typology of standards which can help practitioners to select the
standard most relevant to their specific requirements.

 

Access to digital knowledge is no longer just a “nice-to-have”, it is a
fundamental human right as important as access to food and water, to
appropriate educational and health services. The World Health Organisation
has reported that thousands of people die every day because they do not have
access to appropriate health information. Content and languages currently
ignored by mainstream localisation efforts – because there is no “business
case” for them - can realistically only be tackled using leading edge
component technologies linked together in standardised and interoperable
frameworks. Efforts under the umbrella of The Rosetta Foundation and the
United Nations’ Internet Governance Forum to create such an open framework
will be outlined, and their potential highlighted to reach billions of users
currently being excluded from the digital world.