FactSheet

1 MultilingualWeb-LT

Start date: 1 January 2012

End date: 31 December 2013

Project officer: Kimmo Rossi

Website:

1.1 Challenge

Organisations increasingly use the Web as their primary means of communicating with customers and stakeholders. An organisation's web content is continuously generated by a large range of internal and external users, requiring Content Management Systems to ensure it is maintained in a coherent and navigable state. Organisations targeting an international market must also localise web content so that it can be presented effectively across many languages and cultures. Localisation is typically outsourced to Language Service Providers (LSPs) who employ translators supported by language technologies such as machine translation and translation memory to deliver localised content to tight cost, time and quality constraints. Organisations may also to directly apply machine translation to web content in situations where its volume or transient nature precludes the expense of the quality-assured translations offered by LSPs. However, smooth interoperation between diverse, changing web content and both localisation workflows and machine translation services remains a challenge, with upto 20% of localisation costs being attributed to manual content transform overheads.

1.2 Goal

The goal of MultilingualWeb-LT is to define standards for Web content that facilitate its seamless interaction with multilingual technologies and localization processes. This will be achieved with broad industry consensus via the formation of a working group under the W3C's Internationalisation Activity.

1.3 Innovation

MultilingualWeb-LT, for the first time in a single standardisation effort, brings together expertise in the Web content management and internationalisation (i.e. the creation of localisation-ready content) with expertise from the LSP and language technology sectors. It will build on the W3C's previous standards on internationalisation to address the round-trip localisation of Web content(mainly HTML5) and "deep Web" content, for example a CMS or XML files from which HTML pages are generated. This will lay the foundations for low cost localisation of Web Content at increasingly large scales, especially the efficiencies and maturing quality promised by integrated machine translation are realised.

1.4 Results

MultilingualWeb-LT will engage widely with the content management, localisation and language technology industries to deliver a W3C recommendation on meta-data that will support seamless intoperability between content management, localisation workflows and language technologies. MultilingualWeb-LT will also deliver reference implementations, open test suites and support material to promote the widerst uptake of this standard in both the web content management and localisation industries.

1.5 Impact

MultilingualWeb-LT will lay the technical foundations for new business opportunities for web content creators and for the providers of language and content services and tools. This will enable 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.