Dr. Arle Lommel is the former director of open standards at the Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA), where he had worked from 1998 through 2011. He is currently Standards Coordinator for the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA)’s standards initiative. He currently resides in Bloomington, Indiana with his wife and four children.
"A critical need for information about standards"
There has been plenty of debate and speculation following the liquidation of the Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA). Dr. Arle Lommel is the former director of open standards at LISA. He is currently Standards Coordinator for the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA)'s standards initiative, where he is focusing on establishing a broad program to promote the use of standards.
Who do the former LISA standards really belong to legally?
LISA’s statutes required that the standards be donated to a successor organization. After considerable consultation with LISA members and the broader community, the decision was made to donate them to ETSI for maintenance. Even though ETSI will own the current versions of LISA standards, other groups can develop individual standards by coordinating with ETSI (to avoid “forking” the standards).
What are GALA's plans for the standards?
GALA does not want to become a standards body and will not develop them directly. However, we will be active in ETSI or whichever organization takes over their development, and we will promote best practices for their use.
What GALA will do is promotional and educational work around the standards. There are now over 100 standards relevant to localization, but few are known or used. Many of them are ignored because they are complex and there are no tools to support them. As a result there is a critical need for relevant information about these standards.
Beyond that, we also need active coordination between standards bodies and committees. There are more than 20 groups active in this space in some form and ad hoc informal communication between them will result in duplicated effort and inconsistent results. If GALA interfaces with them to provide centralized coordination, it will increase efficiency and help eliminate duplication and inconsistency.
Which stakeholders does GALA have in mind? Who will take care of what?
We want to be as inclusive as possible and have made a point of reaching out to language service providers, their clients, industry organizations, standards bodies, tools developers, translators, and others. We have found that these constituencies understand the need for coordination and shared effort. We are currently in the process of setting up liaison relationships with many bodies and organizations and are collaborating with them.
We are often asked specifically about TAUS, which has announced that it intends to be the “interoperability watchdog.” We are working with TAUS to ensure that our efforts will be complementary and coordinated, and GALA envisions a high-level structure like the following:
- GALA focus: coordination between bodies, information sharing, training, education, research on business needs. (see www.gala-global.org/standards)
- TAUS focus: promotion of technical interoperability, certification of tools and processes for interoperability standards compliance, reference implementations of standards. (see www.translationautomation.com)
- Individual standards bodies: development of individual specifications
In this arrangement each body will benefit from greater transparency and coordination.
Which standards are we talking about?
In the localization industry, “standards” usually refers to one thing: data interoperability standards. There I see XLIFF, TMX, TBX, and SRX as particularly critical at this time. These standards provide a backbone for real work. They have all fallen short of their potential, however, in large part because different vendors have implemented them in different ways (or not implemented them at all). So we need to not only develop them further to address modern needs, but we need to provide guidance on how to use them.
The GALA initiative is also working on two new standards efforts: the “Container Project” (a “package” format for sending and receiving translation jobs and project details developed in partnership with the Brigham Young University Translation Research Group), and a new modular framework for representing domain-specific language/translation quality assessment information. Both of these are in their early stages, but we will be submitting them to standards bodies soon.
Beyond these technical standards, we also need standard service profiles to define many basic localization tasks. To take one common example, if you are told that English → German “localization” will cost you €0.12/word, what does that mean? Does it include engineering, review (and if so, what sort of review?), DTP, or terminology research? If you don't know, the price you get is essentially meaningless and the results may not meet your expectations.
I heard talk about a certification program. Who is supposed to get certified? And who will do the certification?
We have yet to begin this project (it is scheduled for the second year of our plan), so I can only answer this question in broad terms, but we are talking about certification for skill requirements defined in the standard service profiles mentioned above. So when we know precisely what, for example, “localization engineering” means, GALA would develop tests for those skill sets. We would hand administration of the actual tests to an independent certification body. We would, of course, oversee the process and verify that the testing body meets certain requirements.