P02: Using Standards to Improve Workflow

Overview: The language services industry is awash with standards. How do we know which standards can help us with our projects? Whether it is XLIFF, ITS, or another acronym, it is time for clarity. We are happy to bring you industry experts for a full day of helpful information, offering real world examples of user-ready processes. Come prepared to learn from others and share your own experiences with standards. The content is ideal for both client and supply side — anyone who is trying to improve their language services workflow.

9:00-9:10: Welcome and Introductions

9:10-10:10: Supporting XLIFF in Microsoft Products 
Speaker: Kevin O’Donnell (Microsoft)
Synopsis: In the past few years, Microsoft has embraced XLIFF to improve its localization interoperability efforts. Following a successful adoption internally, XLIFF has recently featured in Microsoft product releases, including Visual Studio and SharePoint, empowering customers worldwide to create solutions based on strong localization standards. In this session, Kevin O'Donnell, from the Windows International team, explains how Microsoft created a consistent implementation of XLIFF across the company and how others can take advantage of the opportunities presented by the support for XLIFF in Microsoft products.

10:10-10:30: Break

10:30-11:30: Okapi Insight — Okapi's New Editor
Speaker: Phil Ritchie (VistaTEC)
Synopsis:  Insight is the latest application of the open source Okapi Framework suite of localization tools. Insight is an editor that helps you define metadata rendering rules and filters, fitting seamlessly within the Okapi workflow. It is fully compatible with the XLIFF and ITS 2.0 standards. We will demonstrate two example configurations of the editor, one for linguistic review and one for post-editing, and share some of the roadmap for further integration and capabilities.

11:30-12:30: Practical Uses of ITS 2.0
Speaker: Yves Savourel (ENLASO)
Synopsis:  The Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) version 2.0 is an important specification from the W3C. It is very helpful for content authors and localization service providers. This session provides concrete examples of using ITS during the localization workflow. Learn about the ITS mechanism and features and see how you can use ITS on your own.

12:30-1:30: Lunch

1:30-2:30: Interoperability Through Open Standards
Speaker: David Filip (LRC/CNGL, University of Limerick)
Synopsis: David Filip will explain how a multitude of standards from core IT, WWW, internationalization and localization areas underlies real life automation of the content life cycle management; how a mature industry builds up a body of wisdom that in turn enables true interoperability among many specialized and competing services. Get insight into roadmaps of the two most prominent standards in the industry: XLIFF 2.0 — the open standard message format and ITS 2.0 — the modular vocabulary for your metadata.

2:30-3:30: Standards:  Liberation, not Limitation
Speakers: Patricia Bown (Kilgray Translation Technologies), Lexie Sabota (Kilgray Translation Technologies)
Synopsis:  In localization, standards bring you the possibility of competitive advantage, even in an industry well populated with dominant market leaders in every role. Standards are the reason you have choices for solving problems and meeting challenges. Standards provide an underlying framework for combining the best of both worlds — technology and human brainpower. Using examples from memoQ, this presentation looks at the various points where standards facilitate flexibility and interoperability — key concepts, no matter the technology, in meeting the ever increasing pace and volume of demand for localization.

3:30-4:00: Break

4:30-5:30: At the End of the Day . . .
Speaker: Stefan Gentz (Tracom OHG)
Synopsis:  TMX, TBX, XLIFF, ITS, DITA, XML, HTML5 — we hear the praise for standards every day. Tool providers claim to support them or even claim to be building on them. This session is a reality check. Do we really need all ofthese standards? Are these standards and the big tool providers actually mature enough to turn those ideas into values? Does reality live up to the promises? Does a standard like TMX really help to exchange translation memory data? Do we need to put a standard like XLIFF on standards like DITA or HTML5? Do these standards actually help to save money? Stefan Gentz will dive deeply into these questions using real world examples, looking over the major tool providers' shoulders, to unveil some dirty little secrets and how you can work around them.