Press Releases

from LISA'S OSCAR GROUP and the SALT PROJECT

Amsterdam, December 1, 2000, Renaissance Hotel (with December 14 revision)

OSCAR Forms Alliance with SALT and Expands Role in Language Industry

At the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the LISA organization, the OSCAR group, founded as a LISA Special Interest Group in June 1997 at a roundtable of language industry representatives, has announced a strategic alliance with the SALT project and its intention to take on an expanded role in the language industry.

Best known for developing the widely accepted TMX format for exchanging translation memory data between components in the multilingual information production cycle, OSCAR has agreed to use the format from the SALT project as its TBX format for exchanging terminology exchange. Data exchange standards are crucial to building cost-effective language techology solutions to the globalization challenge.

TBX (for TermBase eXchange) was agreed on over a year ago as the name for the OSCAR terminology format, and proposals were solicited for the substance of the format. In the meantime, the SALT project, with funding from both the European Union and Microsoft corporation, has defined an XML terminology format based on ISO standards (including ISO 12200 and 12620) and OLIF standards. OSCAR has now chosen to use the SALT format rather than develop its own. This convergence is welcomed in the language industry, where competing standards mean inefficiency and incompatibility.

In addition to defining exchange standards such as TMX and TBX, OSCAR is poised to venture into markup of documentation and other content to further facilitate the increasingly visible business process of globalization. By internationalizing content with markup that indicates what should and should not be translated, what multi-word expressions should be considered to be terms, and other information useful to a localizer or translator, producers of content can set the stage for more efficient language technology software. This expanded role for OSCAR will require the formation of additional alliances with such organizations as the World Wide Web Consortium, but is in line with the expansion of the OSCAR acronym: Open Standards for container and Content Allowing Re-use.

for more information on LISA and the OSCAR SIG visit www.lisa.org or www.lisa.unige.ch

for more information on SALT visit www.ttt.org/salt or www.loria.fr/projets/salt

for more information on OLIF visit www.olif.net

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