We are expecting talks from Microsoft, Wikimedia, Mozilla, Joomla, the European Commission and CNGL representatives at the MultilingualWeb workshop in Luxembourg, and we will be filling the remaining slots soon. The deadline for submission of talk proposals is 10th February, so if you want to speak at the event please registeras soon as possible. You can submit your proposal on the registration form.

We also recently announced that Ivan Herman , Semantic Web Activity Lead at the World Wide Web Consortium(W3C), will deliver the keynote talk.

This fourth MultilingualWeb workshopwill be held in Luxembourg, hosted by the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) of the European Commission.

The MultilingualWeb project is looking at best practices and standards related to all aspects of creating, localizing and deploying the Web multilingually. The project aims to raise the visibility of existing best practices and standards and identify gaps, with a view to helping content creators, localizers, tools developers, and others meet the challenges of the multilingual Web.

Participation is free. We welcome participation from both speakers and non-speaking attendees. For more information and to register, see the Call for Participation.

The Unicode Consortium has announced the release of Version 6.1 of the Unicode Standard, continuing Unicode’s long-term commitment to support the full diversity of languages around the world. This latest version adds characters to support additional languages of China, other Asian countries, and Africa. It also addresses educational needs in the Arabic-speaking world. A total of 732 new characters have been added.

This version of the Standard also brings technical improvements to support implementers. Improved changes to property values and their aliases mean that properties now have easy-to-specify labels. The new labels combined with a new script extensions property means that regular expressions can be more straightforward and are easier to validate.

Over 200 new Standardized Variants have been added for emoji characters, allowing implementations to distinguish preferred display styles between text and emoji styles. For example:

Among the notable property changes and additions in Unicode 6.1 are two new line break property values, which improve the line-breaking behavior of Hebrew and Japanese text. Segmentation behavior was also improved for Thai, Lao, and similar languages.

Two other important Unicode specifications are maintained in synchrony with the Unicode Standard, and have updates for Version 6.1. These will be finalized in February:

UTS #10, Unicode Collation Algorithm
UTS #46, Unicode IDNA Compatibility Processing

Ivan Herman , Semantic Web Activity Lead at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), will deliver the keynote talk at the upcoming MultilingualWeb workshop. This 4th MultilingualWeb workshop will be held in Luxembourg, hosted by the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) of the European Commission.

Ivan will give an overview of the current work done at the W3C related to the Semantic Web, Linked Data, and related technical issues. The goal is not to give a detailed technical account but, rather, to give a general, and accessible, overview and use this is a basis for further discussions on how that particular technology can be used for the general issue of Multilingual Web.

Formerly head of the worldwide W3C Offices program, Ivan has been with the W3C since 2001, and also holds a tenure position at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Sciences (CWI) in Amsterdam. He is a member of IW3C2 (International World Wide Web Conference Committee), and of SWSA (Semantic Web Science Association), the committee responsible for the International Semantic Web Conferences series.

The MultilingualWeb project is looking at best practices and standards related to all aspects of creating, localizing and deploying the Web multilingually. The project aims to raise the visibility of existing best practices and standards and identify gaps, with a view to helping content creators, localizers, tools developers, and others meet the challenges of the multilingual Web.

Participation is free. We welcome participation from both speakers and non-speaking attendees. For more information and to register, see the Call for Participation.

15 – 16 March 2012, Luxembourg. Co-located with the European Commission’s Language Technology Showcase Days, and hosted by the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) of the European Commission.

The MultilingualWeb projectis looking at best practices and standards related to all aspects of creating, localizing and deploying the Web multilingually. The project aims to raise the visibility of existing best practices and standards and identify gaps. The core vehicle for this is a series of four events which are planned over two years.

After three highly successful workshops in Madrid, Pisa, and Limerick, this final workshop in the series will continue to investigate currently available best practices and standards aimed at helping content creators, localizers, tools developers, and others meet the challenges of the multilingual Web.

Participation is free. We welcome participation from both speakers and non-speaking attendees. For more information, see the Call for Participation

The MultilingualWeb Workshop in Limerickwas once more a success, thanks to the efforts of the excellent speakers and the local organizers, but also thanks this time to the participants themselves who enthusiastically took part in the Open Space discussion organized by TAUS. This will hopefully lead to some longer term initiatives, and most groups are already planning to continue their discussions in Luxembourg, next Spring. We had around 90 attendees.

The program pagehas now been updated to point to speakers’ slides and to the relevant parts of the IRC logs. Links to video recordings will follow shortly.

There will also be a page pointing to social media reports, such as blog posts, tweets and photos, related to the workshop. If you have any blog posts, photos, etc. online, please let Richard Ishida know (ishida@w3.org) so that we can link to them from this page.

A summary report of the workshop will follow a little later.

Register nowif you want to ensure that you get a place.

Participation in the workshop is free, but spaces are limited. We have another great programin place.

The keynote speaker will be Daniel Glazman, of Disruptive Innovations, and co-chair of the W3C CSS Working Group. He is followed by a strong line up in sessions entitled Developers, Creators, Localizers, Machines, Users, and Policy. On the morning of the second day Jaap van der Meer of TAUS will facilitate “Open Space” style discussion sessions, where workshop participants themselves will choose topics to discuss in several breakout groups.

There will be a dinner reception on the evening of 21 September (free of charge, workshop registrants only).

The MultilingualWeb workshops, funded by the European Commission and coordinated by the W3C, look at best practices and standards related to all aspects of creating, localizing and deploying the multilingual Web. The workshops are successful because they attracted a wide range of participants, from fields such as localization, language technology, browser development, content authoring and tool development, etc., to create a holistic view of the interoperability needs of the multilingual Web.

This workshop is co-located with the 16th Annual LRC Conference, and hosted by the LRC (Language Research Centre) and the University of Limerick.

We look forward to seeing you in Limerick!

How do people’s names differ around the world, and what are the implications of those differences on the design of forms, databases, ontologies, etc. for the Web?

People who create web forms, databases, or ontologies are often unaware how different people’s names can be in other countries. They build their forms or databases in a way that assumes too much on the part of foreign users. This article introduces you first to some of the different styles used for personal names, and then some of the possible implications for handling those on the Web.

Read the article.

By Richard Ishida, W3C.

An initial program has been published for the upcoming W3C MultilingualWeb workshop in Limerick, Ireland, 21-22 September 2011. (Co-located with the 16th Annual LRC Conference.)

The keynote speaker will be Daniel Glazman, of Disruptive Innovations, and co-chair of the W3C CSS Working Group. He is followed by a strong line up in sessions entitled Developers, Creators, Localizers, Machines, Users, and Policy.

See the Call for Participationfor details about how to register for the workshop. Participation in the workshop is free.

The MultilingualWeb workshops, funded by the European Commission and coordinated by the W3C, look at best practices and standards related to all aspects of creating, localizing and deploying the multilingual Web. The workshops are successful because they attracted a wide range of participants, from fields such as localization, language technology, browser development, content authoring and tool development, etc., to create a holistic view of the interoperability needs of the multilingual Web.

We look forward to seeing you in Limerick!

Einstellung der bevorzugten Sprachen im Browser(Setting language preferences in a browser)

Einrichtung von MultiViews-Sprachvereinbarung auf Apache(Apache MultiViews language negotiation set up)

These articles were translated into German thanks to Gunnar Bittersmann.