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Industry News

January 2003

Move to develop Web services standard for translation by OASIS members

A technical committee has been formed by the members of the OASIS standards consortium to develop standards to automate the translation and localisation process as a Web service. The effort unites DataPower, IBM, the Localisation Research Centre, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and others in a collaboration that plans to use Web services as the backbone to a workflow linking the tasks that comprise a complex software localisation project.

"Web services hold enormous potential for improving the way localisation business is conducted," said Peter Reynolds, chair of the OASIS Translation Web Services Technical Committee, "but first the industry must come together to agree on standards." The new OASIS Technical Committee will concentrate first on defining service types that are relevant to the software/content localisation and translation industry. Their specification will drive the development of Web Services Definition Language documents that will ultimately be published in a Universal Description and Discover Integration registry and potentially also in an ebXML registry.

VistaTEC earns the Fast 500 Technology Award from Deloitte & Touche

For the second year in a row, VistaTEC, a globalisation services provider that specialises in localisation and testing of enterprise, mobile and desktop applications, has earned the Technology Fast 500 award from Deloitte & Touche, this year ranking 389th. The European Fast 500 program is based on an objective standard of percentage growth in revenue. VistaTEC realised growth in revenue from 4M to 11M euro during the three-year period considered. For more information on VistaTEC, visit: http://www.vistatec.ie

IBM Releases ICU 2.4

IBM has recently made available ICU release 2.4. ICU is a Unicode-enablement software library that provides a full range of services for supporting internationalisation, especially in server environments. ICU is principally developed by IBM and used in IBM products, but is also freely available as open-source. It provides cross-platform C, C++ and Java APIs.

ICU version 2.4 provides the basic regular expression support for Unicode as well as custom break iteration registration. Unicode has been adopted by all major software vendors and modern standards such as XML, Java, ECMAScript (JavaScript), LDAP and CORBA.