Come and join us in the South of France

You are very welcome to participate in our workshop on

"Enabling the Delivery of Localized Information and Communication Services"

20 March 2006 in Sophia Antipolis, France

In association with the 20th International Symposium on Human Factors in Telecommunication.

Its your chance to hear how we are thinking, see some of our proposals and to share your own perspectives about this wide and fascinating field.

You will need to register for this free workshop at: http://webapp.etsi.org/MeetingCalendar/MeetingDetails.asp?mid=25755

If one of your passions is enriching the user experience of information and communication products and services, then why not take part in the whole symposium.

Maintaining multi-lingual web sites

From the user's point of view, they would like every web site to be available in their preferred language(s). The costs of doing high quality translation mean that many sites are only available in their original language - many only being available in English.

The article in this link gives a really excellent top-level overview of some of the factors that can lower the times and costs of maintaining multi-lingual web sites. In particular it addresses translation memories, terminologies and effective translation management processes. It also points to some trends in machine translation which may be the only alternative to no translation in some circumstances.

Take a look - if you know about these topics it is likely that this article will have you nodding your head in agreement - a cultural dependency here ;-). If you are new to the field of translation then this will give you a simple quick introduction to the way the market needs to move.

NOTE: You will need to register with infoconomy using your email address to be able to read this article.

Why are we running this blog?

This blog is from a "Specialist Task Force" of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). Behind the anonymous title of STF287 is a 4 person team as you can see:



We are producing a guidance document that will be published by ETSI - you can view our latest draft from our web page.

The starting point for our work is the belief that:

"When communicating with another person or accessing an information service, everyone wants to be able to do so in ways that are compatible with their language and cultural preferences."

We want the readers of our document, who will not all be localization experts, to:

• learn about best practice tools and techniques for localizing information and communication products and services;
• identify techniques that improve the chance that people get services that meets their individual cultural and language requirements.

members of our team have spent many years working on different aspects of the "user experience" of information and communication systems. We believe that recent ETSI work on personalization, user profiles and user identification will be very relevant in achieving the aims of our work.

We have less experience of localization techniques and tools but we have recently learnt a lot by face-to-face discussions with experts in the field. What we now want to do is to explore issues and learn more from a wider group of people - that's why we are looking forward to good ideas from readers of this blog!

To find out more about our team and what we are doing, take a look at our official ETSI web page.