The Birth of a Standard Terminology Format

A group of leading American it companies have joined forces with prominent translation companies to solve some of the problems of doing business in multilingual Europe. Their first order of business? A standard terminology format.

LISA, the Localisation Industry Standards Association, has announced publication of a standard format for the interchange of terminology. The new terminology format, which will carry the seal of approval of the International Standards Organization (ISO), the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), as well as LISA, represents a collaborative effort between these three bodies and is the first concrete accomplishment of this young organization. As such, it reflects a firm commitment on the part of LISA’s members to addressing and solving practical issues in the translation and localization world..
    The basic structure of a LISA terminology entry is a TIG, short for Term Information Group. A TIG consists of an entry with fields for a definition, synonyms, an acronym, and an equivalent term in a target language. For a trilingual entry, three TIGs would therefore be created, one for each language. An entry can furthermore be marked “directional” or “reversible.” For obvious reasons, the LISA format is intended primarily as an interchange format, not a native file format. To implement it, a software technician would write a small program which could convert terminology lists back and forth between the LISA format and the internal format of the terminology management system being used. As part of the project, LISA members submitted descriptions of the fields in their term databases and sample data. For each field currently in use, a corresponding tag name was defined in the LISA format..
    The leader of the LISA terminology project was Len Cantor of IBM EUropean Language Services (Denmark). Cantor’s team worked with Alan Melby of Brigham Young University (Provo, USA) to ensure that the LISA proposal would be TEI compliant; Melby’s Translation Research Group will now be offering tutorials and technical support for the combined TEI term and LISA format. Christian Galinski, executive secretary of the ISO Technical Committee 37, was also consulted during the development of the format, with, as a result, full ISO compliance.
     LISA, which is registered as an independent, non-profit organization in Geneva, Switzerland, evolved out of an earlier organization, the International Industries Translation Standards Association. The founding members of LISA have opted for a two- tiered structure, based on a core management board of some eighteen major companies and a secondary circle of non-voting Associate Members. This structure was chosen to ensure an efficient decision-making process in the adoption and implementation of the standards its members hope to call into being. With the exception of the Dutch ink International and the Belgian Mendez Translations, the LISA management board consists entirely of American companies (or is Berlitz now considered Japanese?) and presents us with the intriguing sight of foreigners taking Europe’s multilingual bull by the horns.
    Mike Anobile, who oversees LISA, nonetheless gives the credit to ink International’s Jaap van der Meer for having the vision to perceive the need for such a forum. Van der Meer brought leading computer companies together with ink International and other large translation companies specializing in it for a roundtable discussion of mutually relevant issues. LISA has since evolved into an independent forum for the exchange of ideas and experiences on reducing multilingual documentation costs. IBM, DEC, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Lotus, and others, arch-rivals in many ways, clearly see the greater common good of working together to raise the level of professionalism in the translation industry, including such specific goals as improving quality, increasing throughput, and – ideally – lowering costs. “Product localization isn’t strategic anymore,” says Anobile. “Nowadays, it’s simply one of the costs of doing business – like buying a plane ticket. That’s why these companies are willing to work together. They don’t want to be in the translation business. They’d probably be delighted to offload the entire effort – if they could find a subcontractor that could handle it all.” That, of course, is where the translation companies come in.

Documentation bottlenecks
Anobile acknowledges that LISA might appear to be primarily dedicated to addressing issues in the IT world, but he stresses that the problems its members are dealing with are by no means unique to it. “Sure, LISA’s management board consists mainly of it world heavyweights,” says Anobile. “But underneath it all, the same procedures, processes, and technologies apply to every company or organization doing business internationally, no matter what their activities are. They all have to deal with the same bottlenecks. And it is the only solution. The techniques and tools which IBM (see page 7) and others develop to deal with their own substantial internal translation requirements can also be useful for other companies, not least of all their valued corporate customers. The latter may soon be realizing the implications of the European Communities Directive on Product Liability Laws with regard to product documentation and come knocking at the door of their it supplier with 50,000 pages of manuals which need to go into ten or fifteen languages. That’s a lot of extra business if the supplier can handle it.” Before translation technology can be successfully deployed to handle these kinds of requirements, however, a large number of organizational, social, and technical issues need to be addressed. Hence LISA..
     LISA’s Anobile is an American who originally came to Switzerland in the late 1970s to help launch Exxon Office Systems International, which was intended to serve as the EUropean base for Exxon Enterprise, Exxon’s ill-fated venture into office automation. After that, a five-year stint as inter-national marketing manager for alps followed. When Alps decided to forsake the software business and concentrate on services, Anobile founded Lexpertise together with Brett Newbold, currently Oracle’s Director of Linguistic Systems, and acquired the rights to a text-proofing program written by Alps in 1981. Lexpertise marketed the program as MacProof, a product which Anobile philosophically concludes was “before its time.”

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