Proposed videos

Hi all,

Last week we mentioned doing some videos about ITS to help us promote our work and make it more accessible. One of the tasks was to develop a very high-level overview that mentions the implementers and provides some context for what they have achieved and why it matters.

What follows is a very rough-cut script for this video. It is not intended to provide any level of detail, but instead provide a four-minute pitch. The other goal is to mention all of the implementations/implementers we have. So please review this carefully and let me know if you have been omitted inadvertently where you should be mentioned or if I am in any way inaccurate in how I mention you.

The closing would feature all partners’/implementers’ logos on the closing page.

While there will be very little detail about any of these implementations, we would plan on additional short videos that address some of the implementations (or combos of implementations) where we could highlight business cases and usability.

The following script is, of course, subject to change, but feedback on the approach and level is welcome. Because some of the terms (like XLIFF) conceivably might not be known to everyone, the description would contain a definition and links to everything, and would also contain links to our implementations page (another reason to get it up to date).

Let me know what you think. If there are no objections from the partners, we’ll put this on the public list early next week.

Best,

Arle




[Introduction]
Structured content in XML or HTML poses special challenges for translation processes. Dealing with these formats has required expert knowledge and they are easily broken without it. The W3C’s new Internationalization Tag Set 2.0, or ITS 2.0, standard provides mechanisms to add information to XML and HTML5 files to support more sophisticated and robust translation and localization processes and to simplify use of these powerful formats.

Why Should You Use ITS 2.0?
If you work with XML or HTML5, ITS offers a number of compelling advantages:

1. ITS 2.0 give you more control. ITS 2.0 lets you control whether content is translated, give instructions to translators, specify how to translate terms, and give guidance to automated processes about how to handle content.

2. ITS 2.0 simplifies management processes and lowers costs. By ensuring that localization resources are included in content and linked to the exact spot where they are needed, project management effort and cost and errors are reduced and processes can be simplified. Case studies have shown cost reductions of up to x% and time savings of y%.

3. ITS 2.0 improves localization quality. ITS 2.0 includes comprehensive markup for domain or subject matter, terminology, and translation quality assessment. It also provides a way for tools to “sign” their work and lets machine translation tell you how confident it is in its results. These features allow you to design smart processes that improve quality up front and focus efforts to identify and deal with problems.

How Can You Use ITS 2.0?
ITS 2.0 is designed to be easy to use. You can use as little or as much of it as you need to. Support for ITS 2.0 is available in common authoring tools like Drupal [mention Cocomore onscreen], DocBook [mention Adobe onscreen], and LibreOffice [mention ]init[ onscreen]. It is also central to open-source tools like the Okapi Framework [mention ENLASO/Okapi/VistaTEC onscreen] and ITS Tool package [mention Shaun McCance/ITS Tool onscreen] for localization and LanguageTool [mention Daniel Naber/LanguageTool onscreen] for language quality checking. HTML5 files using ITS 2.0 can be validated using the validator.nu [mention validator.nu onscreen] service and work seamlessly in modern browsers. Machine translation systems [mention CNGL, Lucy, and Linguaserve onscreen] and text analytics packages [mention IJS Enrycher] are increasingly adopting ITS 2.0 as well as a way to make their results more accessible and usable. It is also designed to work well with major standards like XLIFF.

Because ITS 2.0 has a low barrier to entry and is designed to work with your existing processes, you can start gaining benefit from it without having to completely retool existing processes, and as more and more tools support ITS 2.0 the benefits available will only increase.

Shown onscreen is a list of implementations of ITS 2.0 as of November 2013. For more information on these implementations and how you can leverage them, please visit the ITS 2.0 wiki or view our other videos.