Thanks to the Bhavatmaj Seth, the following article has been translated into Hindi. This is the first translation of an Internationalization Activity article into Hindi.

परिचय कैरेक्टर समूह और कूटबन्धन (Introducing Character Sets and Encodings)

The CSS webfonts tests in the Internationalization Activity test suite have been updated as follows:

• a set of WOFF font tests were added
• HTML5 and XHTML5 were added as a new test formats
• tests now use strict DOCTYPEs
• results pages were consolidated and updated to reflect latest browser version behaviour, and to make it easier to see the assertions used for the tests

Thanks to the Trusted Translations, Inc., the following articles have been translated into both Iberian and Brazilian Portuguese.

Modificação da codificação da página (X)HTML para UTF-8 / Como mudar a codificação de página (X)HTML para UTF-8 (Changing (X)HTML page encoding to UTF-8)
Internacionalização – Dicas rápidas para a Web / Dicas rápidas de internacionalização para a Internet (Internationalization Quick Tips for the Web)
Introdução de conjuntos de caracteres e codificações / Introdução a conjuntos de caracteres e codificações (Introducing Character Sets and Encodings)

The HTML language declaration tests in the Internationalization Activity test suite have been updated as follows:

• tests were simplified, and now rely only on :lang for language detection
• HTML5 and XHTML5 were added as a new test formats
• tests now use strict DOCTYPEs
• results pages were updated to reflect latest browser version behaviour, and to make it easier to see the assertions used for the tests
• some small errors in the tests were corrected

Other changes behind the scenes include gathering of all tests into a single PHP file (generatehtml.php is no longer used). Code in the PHP file was also streamlined.

The general improvements to the test and results pages mentioned above will be added to other tests over time.

The HTML and CSS character encoding tests in the Internationalization Activity test suite have been updated as follows:

• new tests were added to examine behaviour related to the byte-order mark and better represent the current detection algorithm for HTML5
• HTML5 was added as a new test format
• tests now use strict DOCTYPEs
• results pages were updated to reflect latest browser version behaviour, and to make it easier to see the assertions used for the tests

Other changes behind the scenes include gathering of all tests into a single PHP file (generatehtml.php is no longer used). Code in the PHP file was also streamlined.

The general improvements to the test and results pages mentioned above will be added to other tests over time.

The W3C India Office is organizing an International Conference “World Wide Web: Technology, Standards and Internationalization – 2010” in New Delhi on May 6-7, 2010.

The conference will focus on promoting and proliferating W3C Standards in India to enable seamless Web access in Indian languages. One of the major topics covered in the conference will be Internationalization, especially in light of the complexity of implementing Indian languages.

Core Technology Tracks in the Conference include:

1. W3C and Web Technologies
2. Internationalization Aspects in W3C
3. Web Access through mobile and hand-held devices
4. CSS and Styling issues
5. Web Architecture and Semantic Web
6. Human Machine Interface for the Web
7. Web Content Accessibility in Indian Languages
8. W3C and E-Governance

The Conference will also attempt to evolve a Roadmap for proliferation and specific requirements for Indian Languages in W3C and associated standards.

See the W3C India Website.

The Unicode Consortium announced today the release of the new version of the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (Unicode CLDR 1.8), providing key building blocks for software to support the world’s languages.

CLDR 1.8 contains data for 186 languages and 159 territories: 501 locales in all. Version 1.8 of the repository contains over 22% more locale data than the previous release, with over 42,000 new or modified data items from over 300 different contributors.

For this release, the Unicode Consortium partnered with ANLoc, the African Network for Localization, a project sponsored by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), to help extend modern computing on the African continent. ANLoc’s vision is to empower Africans to participate in the digital age by enabling their languages in computers. A sub-project of ANLoc, called Afrigen, focuses on creating African locales.

For more information about Unicode CLDR 1.8, see the CLDR 1.8 Release Note.

Thanks to the Spanish Translation Team, Spanish Translation US, the following articles have been translated into Spanish.

Códigos de idioma de dos o tres letras (Two-letter or three-letter language codes)
Cómo trabajar con mensajes compuestos (Working with Composite Messages)
Reutilización de cadenas en contenido de script (Re-using Strings in Scripted Content)

Read the Working Draft

This document arose out of the frustrations of people who have to work with bidirectional text on the Web in everyday practical situations. For example, it covers issues related to re-use of fragments of text in various new locations by web apps or scripts, or situations where users need to type in or send bidirectional form data. It proposes additions to the HTML5 specification for such situations, which are not covered by the current HTML specification. Many of the ideas in the document, however, are also relevant to markup formats in general, and there are some implications for CSS and XSL-FO (which we hope to address more directly in a subsequent document).

Please send comments on this document to public-i18n-bidi@w3.org. Join the list and view the archive). We hope to publish a new version of the document, incorporating feedback, in about a month (depending on feedback received). We will then ask the HTML WG to review that version.

Editor: Aharon Lanin, Google.

A call has gone out for a Workshop on Conversational Applications — Use Cases and Requirements for New Models of Human Language to Support Mobile Conversational Systems, 18-19 June 2010, Hosted by Openstream, NJ, US

Scope of the Workshop Submissions must describe (1) requirements and use cases for improving W3C standards for conversational interaction and (2) how the use cases justify one or more of these topics:

• Formal notations for representing grammar in: Syntax, Morphology, Phonology, Prosodics
• Engine standards for improvement in processing: Syntax, Morphology, Phonology, Lexicography
• Lexicography standards for: parts-of-speech, grammatical features and polysemy
• Formal semantic representation of human language including: verbal tense, aspect, valency, plurality, pronouns, adverbs, etc.
• Efficient data structures for binary representation and passing of: parse trees, alternate lexical/morphologic analysis, alternate phonologic analysis
• Other suggested areas or improvements for standards based conversational systems development

Experts in the following technology areas would be welcome.

• computational linguistics
• speech prosody
• syntax
• internationalization
• mobile applications
• MMI/voice technology

For more information see http://www.w3.org/2010/02/convapps/cfp.html