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The W3C Internationalization (I18n) Activity works with W3C working groups and liaises with other organizations to make it possible to use Web technologies with different languages, scripts, and cultures. From this page you can find articles and other resources about Web internationalization, and information about the groups that make up the Activity. Read also about opportunities to participate and fund work via the new Sponsorship Program.
What the W3C Internationalization Activity does
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New translations into German
Personennamen aus aller Welt (Personal names around the world)
Angabe der Sprache in HTML (Declaring language in HTML)
Stylen anhand von Sprachattributen (Styling using language attributes)
Kennzeichnung der Sprache von Linkzielen (Indicating the language of a link destination)
Warum man Sprachattribute verwenden sollte (Why use the language attribute?)
Unicode-Steuerzeichen vs. Markup für bidirektionalen Text (Unicode controls vs. markup for bidi support)
Verwendung von Unicode-Steuerzeichen für bidirektionalen Text (Using Unicode controls for bidi text)
HTML-Seiten in arabischer, hebräischer und anderen von rechts nach links geschriebenen Schriften erstellen (Creating HTML Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and Other Right-to-left Scripts)
Umgang mit Sprachangaben in HTML (Working with language in HTML)
These articles were translated into German thanks to Gunnar Bittersmann.
Call for position statements: Linked Data for Language Technology #LiderEU
The LD4LT (Linked Data for Language Technology) Workshop will be held on 21 March, in Athens, Greece, aligned with the European Data Forum 2014. See the agenda.
The workshop is a free community event – there is no admission fee for participants, but registration is required.
You are encouraged to provide a title for a position statement in your registration form. This is a simple, short statement that summarizes your ideas / technologies / use cases related to Linked Data and Language Technology.
The meeting is supported by the LIDER project, the MultilingualWeb community, the NLP2RDF project, the Working Group for Open Data in Linguistics as well as the DBpedia Project.
As input to the discussion and the work of the LD4LT group, you may also want to fill in the first LIDER survey.
First public working draft of Encoding published
The Internationalization Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Encoding.
While encodings have been defined to some extent, implementations have not always implemented them in the same way, have not always used the same labels, and often differ in dealing with undefined and former proprietary areas of encodings. This specification attempts to fill those gaps so that new implementations do not have to reverse engineer encoding implementations of the market leaders and existing implementations can converge.
This is a snapshot of the Encoding Living Standard, as of the date shown on the title page. No changes have been made in the body of the W3C draft other than to align with W3C house styles. The primary reason that W3C is publishing this document is so that HTML5 and other specifications may normatively refer to a stable W3C Recommendation.
Register now for the 7th W3C MultilingualWeb Workshop, Madrid, 7-8 May
Register early to ensure you get a place. Anyone may attend all sessions at no charge and the W3C welcomes participation by both speakers and non-speaking attendees.
Since 2010 the W3C’s Multilingual Web Workshop series has become the preeminent venue for discussion of the standards and technologies that define and enable multilingualism on the Web. The 7th Workshop, “New Horizons for the Multilingual Web,” will be held 7–8 May 2014 in Madrid, Spain.
The workshop brings together participants interested in the best practices, new technologies, and standards needed to help content creators, localizers, language tools developers, and others address the new opportunities and challenges of the multilingual Web. It will provide for networking across communities and building connections.
We are particularly interested in speakers who are facing emerging challenges or who can demonstrate novel solutions for reaching out to a global, multilingual audience. The deadline for speaker proposals is March 14, but early submission is strongly encouraged.
This workshop is made possible by the generous support of the LIDER project, which will organize a roadmapping workshop on linked data and content analytics as one of the tracks at Multilingual Web Workshop.
See the Call for Participation and register online.
Building bridges: Tutorial, Linked Data for Language Technologies at LREC 2014 Conference #LiderEU
Under the umbrella of the Lider project and the MutilingualWeb community, the tutorial on Linked Data for Language Technologies aims at building bridges between two communities. Experts in language resources and applications will learn how to work with technical building blocks of linked data (RDF, SPARQL, …); how to build linked data lexicon representations using the LEMON model; and how to integrate natural language processing workflows using the RDF NIF format. The tutorial is part of the LREC 2014 conference. The presenters are key participants in the LIDER projects and in W3C community groups like OntoLex, Best Practices for Multilingual Linked Open Data, and Linked Data for Language Technology.
ITS 2.0 for everybody – the ITS 2.0 promotion video is now online
Several participants of the ITS Interest Group have created a video to promote ITS 2.0. The video explains usage scenarios for ITS 2.0 and also explains benefits in easy terms for a non-technical audience. It will be the main video of the ITS 2.0 video channel. In the next weeks further videos will be added, to showcase ITS 2.0 implementations in various usage scenarios.
New translations into Romanian
Codările caracterelor (Character encodings)
Manipularea codării de caracter în HTML și CSS (Handling character encodings in HTML and CSS)
Codarea caracterelor: Concepte esențiale (Character encodings: Essential concepts)
These articles were translated into Romanian thanks to George Misel.
For review: Update to What you need to know about the bidi algorithm and inline markup
An updated version of What you need to know about the bidi algorithm and inline markup is out for wide review. We are looking for comments over the next two weeks. After the review period is over, this content will be copied to the same location as the current version of What you need to know about the bidi algorithm and inline markup and the URL of the updated version will cease to exist.
The update rewrites the article to reflect the recent changes in bidi markup in the HTML5 specification.
Technically speaking, the main change is that the dir
attribute now isolates text by default with respect to the bidi algorithm. Isolation as a default is the recommendation of the Unicode Standard as of version 6.3.
From a less technical point of view, the main advantages to the update are that the new methods introduced here reduce the need to use a new approach when the direction of content is known, and therefore makes for a much simpler transition for both content authors and browser developers to support the advances in the handling of bidirectional text content. At the same time, these approaches have good results for existing legacy content.
Please send comments to www-international@w3.org.
Linked Data for Language Technology (LD4LT) Group Kick-Off Meeting and Roadmap meeting, 21 March, Athens, Greece
Linked Data (LD) has proven beneficial in many new and unforeseen ways for Language Technology (LT) and the newly gained interoperability and availability of LT data and services is currently receiving industry adoption. With the foundation of the LD4LT W3C community group, we would like to start the discussion and analyse current trends as well as offer a crystallization point to coordinate the development of future LD-based LT applications. See the agenda.
All feedback is welcome and participation is open to all interested organisations and individuals from industry and academia.
The LD4LT Group Kick-Off and Roadmap Meeting is supported by the LIDER project, the MultilingualWeb community, the NLP2RDF project, the Working Group for Open Data in Linguistics as well as the DBpedia Project.
The event will take place 21 March in Athens, aligned with the European Data Forum 2014. Participation in the LD4LT meeting is free, but registration is required.
As input to the discussion and the work of the LD4LT group, you may consider to fill in the first LIDER survey. During the kick-off meeting, via the survey and in the LD4LT group, provide your view on how linked data and language technology should benefit each other.
W3C MultilingualWeb Workshop Announced: New Horizons for the Multilingual Web
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To be held 7-8 May 2014 in Madrid, Spain, W3C announced today the seventh MultilingualWeb workshop in a series of events exploring the mechanisms and processes needed to ensure that the World Wide Web lives up to its potential around the world and across barriers of language and culture.
This workshop is made possible by the generous support of the LIDER project. As part of the event, LIDER will organize a roadmapping workshop on linked data and content analytics.
Anyone may attend all sessions at no charge and the W3C welcomes participation by both speakers and non-speaking attendees. Early registration is encouraged due to limited space.
Building on the success of six highly regarded previous workshops, this workshop will emphasize new technology developments that lead to new opportunities for the Multilingual Web. The workshop brings together participants interested in the best practices and standards needed to help content creators, localizers, language tools developers, and others meet the challenges of the multilingual Web. It provides further opportunities for networking across communities. We are particularly interested in speakers who can demonstrate novel solutions for reaching out to a global, multilingual audience.
See the Call for Participation and register online.
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