1 Press Releases March 2012

1.1 Template from Ian Jacobs for W3C Press release (General + Web audience)

NEWS

• W3C announces today new efforts to bring the Web to more people across the globe.
• W3C's new MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group will develop standards that will facilitate automatic translation and the smooth integration of web content with translation services, making it easier to include more people in the Web

PROBLEM WE ARE SOLVING

• [Some data here about world's languages and their use on the web]
  • While English remains the most widely-spoken language by web users (~536 million), it accounts for less than one third of all internet users (~27%). Chinese is rapidly increasing (currently ~445 million or 24% of all users) and other languages account for significant numbers of users. (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm)

• [Some data here about the business need that is driving this standards work, and preliminary ideas for addressing it. Extra credit if you can put a dollar figure on the translation industry ;)]
  • Recent estimates of the size of the translation/content globalization industry range from €16/US$21 billion (Adriane Rinsche and Nadia Portera-Zanotti, Study on the size of the language industry in the EU, 2009) to €20/US$26 billion (Common Sense Advisory, 2010), with sustained double-digit annual growth rates over the past few years despite the economic downturn.
  • Globally, the Language Services Market is predicted to reach US$25 billion by 2013. (no citation given)NOTE: For simplicity’s sake, we need to pick one set of numbers and use them. I would actually suggest that we express a range based on the EC study and Common Sense Advisory, since those are pretty well respected.
  • A 2011 survey of businesses revealed a majority experienced that 10-20% of their translation budgets was lost to a lack of interoperability. (Is this the XLIFF survey?)
  • Many of the world’s major corporations derive a substantial portion of their revenue from localized products and according to a 2007 estimate, without localization the 2006 profits of selection of Global Fortune 500 companies known to localize products would have decreased from $US 365 billion to a loss of $US 225 billion (Arle Lommel, Globalization Industry Primer, Localization Industry Standards Association, 2007, p. 8).
  • Translation of product materials has proven a remarkably effective way to enable increased revenue: In the mid-1990s it was estimated by members of the Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA) that every dollar spent on product localization enabled ten dollars of additional revenue. By 2007 that figure had risen to twenty-five dollars of additional revenue for every dollar spent. (While localization does not account of all of that revenue, it is a necessary condition to achieve it.)
  • As Internet penetration continues to increase, the importance of supporting accurate content translation is also increasing. Widely cited analysis (Common Sense Advisory 2006) shows that over half of Internet users will not buy from sites that do not support their language. This percentage is likely to rise as new populations not fluent in English or other major languages begin using the web. Even for those users who do speak English as a second language, native-language content is generally preferred.
  • Organisations targeting an international market must localise their web content so that it can be presented effectively across many languages and cultures. (Can this be replaced by the previous point? It seems to be saying the same thing, but in a more specific fashion)

WHO BENEFITS AND HOW

• MultilingualWeb-LT will seed new business opportunities for web content creators and for the providers of language and content services and tools. (ARLE: it seems to me that this is a secondary potential impact: we cannot guarantee that what we do will create new business opportunities. I don’t doubt that that may happen, but causality is hard to demonstrate. I would instead try to refer to lowering barriers and costs for translation or something like that.) This (ARLE: the antecedent is a bit unclear here.) will enable help (ARLE: This assumes that they would not otherwise do it. I think the point is that we make it easier and more reliable) content creators and distributors to address the growing linguistic and cultural diversity of the global community of Web users by providing them with localised web content in a timely and cost-effective manner.
• MultilingualWeb-LT will provide tools to support the accurate adaptation of content across linguistic and cultural boundaries.

WHO IS INVOLVED

• Information about organizations that joined W3C to participate in this group.

1.2 Who will profit from MLW-LT?

• MultilingualWeb-LT benefits all participants in the multilingual chain:

• 1. Final users who will have access to more and better information in their own language.
• 2. Web owners, who will be able to communicate better and more efficiently with users.
• 3. Manufacturers of systems for management and publication of information on the web, who could benefit from external systems through metadata labelling in content.
• 4. IT companies that set up and construct websites, which could be more accurate in multilanguage management, including multilanguage management elements.
• 5. Language service providers (LSP’s) company which would be able to take advantage of standardisation in order to improve and extend its solutions and applications.
• 6. Public bodies which will have a small tool available to them for better global web development.
• 7. Minority languages which could join the Information Society in better conditions.
• 8. Communications company companies which will offer more and better content, increasing traffic.
• 9. Language specialists who will be able to better analyse characteristics of the languages on the web.
• 10. Linguistic Technology developers who will have more and better labelled data available.

PAST SUCCESS

• Saw a word here about w3c's reputation and credibility in this space.

1.3 W3C March 2012 Press Release

• W3C original (English) http://www.w3.org/2012/02/mlw-lt.html.en
• Translations will be at http://www.w3.org/2012/02/mlw-lt.html.@@ . @@ is the language code for the target language of the translation, e.g. http://www.w3.org/2012/02/mlw-lt.html.ja for Japanese

1.4 General Audience

Ireland

Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) academic partners, University of Limerick (UL), Trinity College Dublin (TCD), and Dublin City University (DCU) joined World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as of January 2012. This happened thanks to funding by European Commission to a W3C standardization project MultilingualWeb-LT, in which the three universities play key roles, along with the German coordinator of the project DFKI (German Centre for Artificial Intelligence). The activity is strongly industry connected and received wide support of W3C members such as Adobe, Microsoft, or Indian Government.
The number of Irish Universities at W3C effectively quadrupled, as the only Irish academic member of W3C so far was DERI (Deigital Enterprise Research Institute) at National University Galway (NUIG). DERI also joined the Working Group that has been officially formed last week and announced by W3C today 7th March 2012.
MultilingualWeb-LT is a Working Group that strives to standardize Web content creation in way that takes into account translation and localisation processes. Ireland has been traditionally strong in translation and localisation research, and actually localisation has been first defined in Ireland, as adaptation of mainly software products and related content for foreign language markets. Thanks to this multibillion industry, Ireland has been playing a leading role as a worldwide software exporter.

[Quote from UL VP Research]
[Quote from Indian Government]
[Other quotes?]

About CNGL
[need to get official boiler plates]
About UL
[need to get official boiler plates]
About TCD
[need to get official boiler plates]
About DCU
[need to get official boiler plates]

1.5 For Client/CMS Industry

A key member of the working group is Cocomore, a German company that provides CMS-based solutions for the customer relationship needs of over 30 international clients. Cocomore CEO, Hans-Ulrich von Freyberg says "Language variety presents one of the few remaining barriers on the Web. But with the outcomes of MultilingualWeb-LT our clients can turn previously untapped markets into viable business opportunities."

1.6 For Localisation Industry

Phil Richie, CTO of VistaTEC, a Dublin-based Language Service Provider, said "VistaTEC is always trying to push the boundaries of intelligent automation. We see this working group as an ideal forum to collaborate with stakeholders from all parts of the localization supply chain to define how provenance and other metadata can be transported, communicated and utilized throughout a production workflow to facilitate real-time decision making to the further improvement of quality, speed and cost."

Yves Savourel, Localization Solutions Architect at ENLASO says: "Being able to access and manipulate metadata from the source content to the translator's desktop and throughout the complete localization process is an important foundation for the tools of the future. This will enable more efficient automated processing but also provide a better and richer communication between authors, translators and other participants of the localization projects."

1.7 For Language Technology community / industry

1.8 For Standards workers

1.9 Details

1.9.1 About the World Wide Web Consortium

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. W3C primarily pursues its mission through the creation of Web standards and guidelines designed to ensure long-term growth for the Web. Over 325 organizations are Members of the Consortium. W3C is jointly run by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) in the USA, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) headquartered in France and Keio University in Japan, and has additional Offices worldwide. For more information see http://www.w3.org/

1.9.2 About the W3C Internationalisation Activity

Richard?

1.9.3 About EC Language Technology Support

Kimmo?