Get involved in W3C Internationalization

Related

List of groups

The Internationalization Activity welcomes the participation of individuals and organizations around the world to help improve the appropriateness of the Web for multiple cultures, scripts and languages.

We are always looking for people who can help us (a) understand the state of the international Web, and requirements for improving it, (b) review specifications and support developers, and (c) develop or review educational materials for content developers and others.

See also the list of W3C Internationalization groups, which provides information about github repositories, mailing lists, and home pages.

Benefits of participation

Participation can benefit the participant and his or her organization in the following ways.

The groups need people with a wide range of skills, from technical authoring to specialised knowledge of particular technologies.

Join the Internationalization Working Group (i18n WG)

The Internationalization Working Group provides a wide range of advice and support for groups developing or using international aspects of the Web. It reviews specifications produced by other W3C Working Groups, looking for issues that would cause barriers to deployment and use of Web technologies due to language, script, region or culture, and discusses issues with those groups. It also produces its own documents and content. This includes requirements, guidelines and proposals for specification writers, as well as educational resources, checkers and outreach to help developers and content authors better understand and more widely implement the internationalization aspects of W3C technology. The group also develops tests for internationalization features on the Web, and produces summaries of their results.

See the home page for more information, including how to sign up.

Join the Internationalization Interest Group (i18n IG)

By subscribing to the www-international@w3.org mailing list you can join the Internationalization Interest Group. This will enable you to track discussions and work of the i18n WG, since the list recieves daily digests of all Github traffic and can also be used for adhoc discussions, where appropriate. There are no teleconferences. To join, send a mail to www-international-request@w3.org with subscribe as the subject.

See the home page for more information.

Join a layout task force

Under the umbrella of the i18n IG, and supported by the i18n WG, there are a number of initiatives in place to identify international typography problems experienced by Web users and content authors. The task forces identify and analyse the gaps that exist, document the related requirements, and help spec developers and browser implementers to introduce support for needed local features.

See the layout & typography page for a list of task forces, and information about how to contribute.

Join the ITS IG

The ITS (Internationalization Tag Set) Interest Group aims to foster a community of users of the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) by promoting its adoption and gathering information for its further development. ITS provides a set of concepts that can be mapped to markup and that make it easier to internationalize and localize documents. The group works through a public list and wiki, and monthy teleconference calls.

See the home page for more information.

Internationalization Sponsorship Program

The W3C is looking to increase participation and funding so that we can expand our activity beyond the core work. We invite organisations, governments, and all interested stakeholders to support the sponsorship program. For more information, see the Sponsorship overview 

Join a Community Group (CG)

There are also some related Community Groups, such as the following. New CGs can be started at any time, and this list may not be up to date.Note that these are not run by the Internationalization WG. Anyone can join a CG. The links below point to some examples related to internationalization (they may not all be current). See the full list of CGs.

  1. Ontolex
  2. Sentiment
  3. LD4LT
  4. Chinese Digital Publishing
  5. Character Description Language
  6. Linked Data for Language Technology
  7. Best Practices for Multilingual Linked Open Data
  8. Mobile Web in Indian Languages
  9. Locations and Addresses
  10. Multilingual Web Sites

Other ways to contribute

Review a spec

One of the core activities of the Internationalization Working Group is to check specifications for internationalization issues. We are always looking for help with this, and the benefit goes two ways, since you learn about bleeding edge technology while reviewing the spec.

We also encourage Working Groups to do their own self-review.

The following links may help.

Translate a resource

Many of our articles have been translated, but there's always more work to do. If you are interested in translating something for us, follow this link: