Update on the GALA Standards Initiative

The last few months have been busy ones for the GALA Standards Initiative. It has made a lot of progress on activities and seen considerable interest from professionals and companies around the industry. In the second half of 2011, the Initiative was represented at a number of localization-oriented conferences where GALA was able to inform the broader community about its activities and about standards-related topics in general. As a result, new volunteers and supporters have become involved, and over 600 people have signed up to participate in the GALA Standards Initiative mailing list.

Based on discussions at these events, the GALA Standards Initiative is now focusing its efforts on three core projects:

Coordination and education. There is an ongoing need for coordination between standards bodies and education about their activities. The Initiative is serving on major committees to represent industry perspectives and helping coordinate activities between groups such as the new ETSI Localization Industry Standards Industry Specification Group, the XLIFF technical committee, the Unicode Localization Interoperability committee, ISO TC 37 SC 3, OAXAL, and OpenTM2.
Through regular updates on a new GALA online portal, the Initiative will be able to keep interested parties aware of the activities of the various standards bodies and will be able to gather industry feedback to share with those bodies. GALA provides regular updates through free webinars and our new monthly standards mailings.

Model Service Elements. The localization industry struggles to define its most basic activities, leading to a widespread lack of understanding about services, confusing pricing models, poor quality, and other problems. The GALA Model Service Elements project is working to overcome these issues and to define both standard industry services and the business resources needed to support them such as model RFPs, SLAs, and contracts. These resources will help promote pricing transparency, quality outcomes, and customer satisfaction. The Model Service Elements project aims to issue its first public release of definitions for core industry activities with the accompanying business resources by March 2012.

Linport. The Language Interoperability Portfolio (Linport) project is a joint effort between the GALA Standards Initiative, the Brigham Young University Translation Research Group (TRG), and the European Commission’s Directorate General for Translation (DGT). Linport is defining a standard “container” for sending and receiving translation materials to help overcome the current fragmentation of the industry in which each tool has its own, incompatible package format. Linport has recently seen close collaboration with various branches of the European Commission and is currently in discussion with Interoperability. Its committee is currently working on defining a preliminary Linport format to support bilingual translations, with the goal of later expanding to a broader framework.

www.gala-global.org/gala-standards-initiative
standards[at]gala-global.org