OASIS Tuesday said its members have
decided to hash out standards to automate the translation and localization
process as a Web service.
Common Web services partners IBM and Microsoft will be joined by DataPower,
Oracle, SAP and the Localisation Research Centre to use Web services as the
backbone to a workflow linking the tasks that comprise an intricate software
localization project.
Localization of a Web service
content that requires translation, request quotes or other services from
vendors, and for each party to understand what the other needs. Standard
metadata
OASIS Translation Web Services Technical Committee Chairman Peter Reynolds
discussed the importance of translation and localization for Web services.
“Any publisher of content requiring translation should be able to
automatically connect to and use the services of any translation vendor over
the Internet without previous direct communication,” Reynolds said. “Web
services hold enormous potential for improving the way localization business
is conducted, but first the industry must come together to agree on
standards.”
ZapThink Senior Analyst Ron Schmelzer
agreed and said this particular standard must be as open as possible.
“Localization is definitely a “no-brainer” standardization activity to do
with Web Services,” Schmelzer told
internetnews.com. “For products that work together, especially
translation and formatting products, localization is the sort of activity
that shouldn’t be a proprietary operation.”
Schmelzer said some of the reasons for this prevailing point of view are
that localization is often very costly, error
prone, and resource intensive. Overall, he said, the OASIS move may get the
Web services realm closer to a holy grail of sorts.
“Also, movements to simplify translation and localization, in some ways,
gets us closer to the goal of semantic integration — a holy grail of
integration where systems cannot only communication with each other, but
understand each other as well.”
Schmelzer’s colleague, fellow ZapThink Senior Analyst Jason Bloomberg,
agreed.
“The OASIS translation and localization technical committee aims to simplify
and streamline the work of human translators more so than machine
translation programs, and as such, breaks new ground in the development of
standards-based workflow applications,” Bloomberg told
internetnews.com. “For those people who still see Web Services as
being primarily for synchronous remote procedure call (RPC) applications,
this move by OASIS should be a wakeup call that Web Services have a much
broader applicability.”
The member parties forged a technical committee as the foundation for their
work, as is OASIS’s modus operandi. The firms said they will begin the
process by defining service types that are relevant to the software/content
localization and
translation industry. They hope their specification will drive the
development of Web Services Definition Language (WSDL)
be published in a Universal Description and Discover Integration (UDDI)
registry and, quite possibly, in an ebXML registry.
The OASIS Translation Web Services Technical Committee will coordinate its
efforts with the XLIFF Technical Committee, which works to develop an XML
Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF). The Translation Web Services
technical committee will define standard interfaces between the different
actors that work together in a distributed software localization process. As
data moves through the localization actors, XLIFF tools can be used at a
lower cost.
