The OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) consortium on Tuesday announced that members have formed a technical committee to develop standards for Web services-based language translation services.
The OASIS Translation Web Services Technical Committee will develop a Web service definition language for interactions between publishers of content who need it translated into different languages and the translation vendors, said Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS, in Billerica, Mass. Participating in the effort are DataPower Technology Inc., IBM Corp., the Localisation Research Centre, Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp., SAP AG, and others in a collaboration to use Web services for a workflow linking tasks that comprise a complex software localization process, according to OASIS.
“What [the committee wants] is a standard way of interfacing between those who are requesting the service and those who are providing the services,” Gannon said. The mechanism for the translation will be a set of standard WSDL packets, he said.
Gannon cited software companies as a potential benefactor, with these companies requiring documentation be translated into multiple languages.
The translation is part of an effort in which various industries each need to agree on a standard set of Web services definitions, Gannon said.
The technical committee will concentrate first on defining service types that are relevant to the software/content localization industry. The committee’s specification will drive development of WSDL documents to ultimately be published in a UDDI registry and potentially in an ebXML registry as well, OASIS said.
The committee will coordinate efforts with the OASIS XLIFF (XML Localization Interchange File Format) Technical Committee.
