As soon as a given language has passed the basic stages of language planning (i.e.
when the ‘linguistic norm’ is fixed by establishing a standard orthography and grammar), terminology planning should set in. Without terminology planning the language cannot develop into a tool for professional (or specialised) communication or might be reduced to its GPL (general purpose language) role in folklore and local / regional culture. Terminology planning differs from language planning with respect to other conventions of SPL (special purpose language) use and the ‘creation’ or adoption of terminologies, but should follow as much as possible the basic rules of the GPL in question. In any case a systematic approach with certain normative guidelines should be conceived, also including rules for term formation or borrowing.
Humans communicate in order to exchange ideas, transfer knowledge, hand down culture, express feelings, etc. which to a large extent occurs via content. Content here means any semiotic representation of information and knowledge. It can take the form of TLRs or non-linguistic representations (such as graphical information, etc.), which can increasingly be processed by the computer. Information and knowledge management cannot work effectively without proper content in the form of linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge representations. In future cyberspace the availability of re-usable and interoperable language resources is of utmost importance not only for the dialogue between all kinds of communities but more and more also for industrial and commercial activities.
ICTs provide the technical infrastructure and tools to support inter-human communication as well as the processes to create, process, disseminate and re-use
‘content’ (which is primarily representing knowledge) for multiple purposes and
applications. Increasingly all processes of the creation, processing, dissemination and re-use of content are influenced by ‘wireless’ (mobile) applications of the ICTs.
Contrary to some people’s impression the globalising forces of the ICTs do not necessarily curb cultural diversity. New cultural forms emerge, however; cultural change is accelerated. In this process languages and cultures are competing at global level, with fair chances for small language communities not only to survive, but also to develop – if they make the necessary efforts!
The ICT infrastructures are global, their use, however, is local. Therefore, ICTs – also being ‘products’ and the respective services as well as content – increasingly need to be ‘localised’. Localisation is the process of adapting products and services to a specific local environment, involving the use of appropriate character sets, translations and other aspects that make the products and services usable for users in that specific culture. So multilinguality and cultural diversity (MCD) have to be taken into account.
Localisation is most efficient, if it can build on internationalisation. Internationalisation is the process whereby products and services are implemented in a way that allows for and facilitates the adaptation to local languages and cultural conventions (i.e. MCD).
Internationalisation is a prerequisite for a systematic and thus efficient approach to localisation.
As stated above multilinguality has to been seen in the wider perspective of multilinguality and cultural diversity (MCD), which has an increasing impact on cultural adaptability. The discussion has started at international level in the UN framework – especially at the UNESCO – and has extended to the European level (see Matteini 2001). The ground was prepared by the European Programmes MLAP (Multilingual Action Plan), EAGLES (Expert Advisory Group on Language Engineering Standards – followed by the Programme ISLE, International Standards for Language Engineering) and MLIS (Multilingual Information Society) in the past, and is continued by today’s e-Content Programme. Since a couple of years the discussion has reached management level in big industry.
Multilinguality is quickly becoming a major issue for the European telecos, which are developing into full-service companies, offering a wide range of services (e.g. in the form of e-commerce) via the Internet. Many Web services must be offered in several languages. The design and maintenance of multilingual websites require tools and procedures well beyond what is needed for monolingual websites. Without suitable tools – based on standardised architectures for multilingual websites – these sites and the attendant services are very expensive to create and manage. ICTs are getting cheaper, content more accessible every day. Knowledge transfer, therefore, could, if properly supported, be largely facilitated.
2. Standardisation
From the above it becomes clear that MCD has an impact on ICTs (in terms of both hardware and software), content and the methodologies to create, process and maintain
content, as well as on human behaviour. This has been acknowledged in standardisation in the form of cultural adaptability, which is defined by ISO / IEC JTC 1 as ‘the special characteristics of natural languages and the commonly accepted rules for their use (especially in written form) which are particular to a society or geographic area. Examples are: national characters and associated elements (such as hyphens, dashes, and punctuation marks), correct transformation of characters, dates and measures, sorting and searching rules, coding of national entities (such as country and currency codes), presentation of telephone numbers, and keyboard layouts’.
Cultural adaptability is closely related to processes such as globalisation, internationalisation, localisation, and to some degree personalisation too.
In this connection language-independent approaches applied to content management methods have proven to be most effective. They avoid language-pair comparison / translation / conversion as much as possible for the sake of highest efficiency and effectiveness as well as cost saving in various applications, such as data modelling, localisation, etc. based on multilingual content management in combination with the appropriate HLT (human language technology) tools. In fact this means methodology standardisation in contrast to technical standards focused on ICTs.
Methodology unification / standardisation / harmonisation provides important clues for cost reduction, and at the same time for the improved quality of communication. This refers in particular to the methods concerning language resources (LRs) for the sake of content management, and may refer to the data themselves as well as to data modelling.
Today the metadata approach is state-of-the-art for linking and evaluating information on the Web by making it interoperable. By means of metadata – in the meaning of identified, formally described data elements – the problems of multilinguality of TLRs can be solved comparatively easily. Therefore, ISO / TC 37 has adopted the metadata approach in its HLT related activities. Language resources, such as written and spoken corpora, computational lexicons, terminology databases, speech collection and processing, etc. can be defined as a set of speech or language data and descriptions in machine readable form, used e.g. for building, improving or evaluating natural language and speech algorithms or systems, or as core resources for the software localisation and language services industries, language studies, electronic publishing, international transactions, subject-area specialists and end users. The metadata approach also is a prerequisite for interoperability, i.e. the achievement of partial or total compatibility between heterogeneous data models by mapping of metadata.
At present the creation of those kinds of content, which are based on LRs, is still too slow, too expensive, mostly not good enough and rarely with a guarantee for correctness. ISO / TC 37 is trying to improve this development by preparing standards and other documents with rules as well as guidelines for:
• harmonised metadata;
• unified principles and methods for data modelling;
• standardised meta-models;
• workflow management methods for net-based distributed cooperative creation of terminology and other language resources.
This kind of methodology standardisation not only enhances the performance of content creation, but also ensures the re-usability of data (for other environments, other purposes, different uses and over time) as well as interoperability of data structures.
This in fact decreases costs dramatically.