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Today smart phones and computers do a lot of thinking for us.
But language can still be a huge barrier,
one that is sometimes caused by the very technologies we use
because they do not understand human language.
We rely on our phones for many tasks.
They can help us find our way around a city.
Computers may help us find our perfect match.
And now glasses may even help us tell
whether people are happy or sad.
But when it comes to understanding
what we want to say and translating that into other languages
a wrong translation can put us into embarrassing,
desperate, or even dangerous situations.
Finding the right translation in multilingual world
is like finding your way in a big city. It is easy to get lost.
But there is hope. The new Internationalization Tag Set,
or ITS, version 2.0, can help you find the right way.
How does it do this? It helps us by providing information,
called metadata, about how text should be translated.
This metadata is in the form of so-called "data categories"
that can be understood as signs
guiding you on the way to your destination.
So how does ITS work? Here is one example:
A german pharmaceutical company makes a new medicine
for chronic stomach problems.
Like most medicines, it can cause side effects if you take too much.
One side effect is a "Herzinfarkt".
To make sure this doesn't happen,
the maker ships a paper with the medicine
that explains the side effects.
Later on the medicine is sold in the United States
and "Herzinfarkt" is translated as "myocardial infarction".
Bob, our American patient, is a little confused from time to time
and forgets that he already took his pill twice today.
Later on feels some pain in his chest,
but he doesn't know that the technical term "myocardial infarction"
is the same thing as what is commonly known as a "heart attack".
He has no idea that his symptoms
might be related to the medicine he is taking,
so he keeps on eating his wife's coffee and cake.
He assumes he has just eaten a little too much.
But his pain gets worse and worse.
Finally his wife calls an ambulance.
The ambulance rushes Bob to the hospital.
Bob is lucky and he survives with some heart damage,
but had he waited any longer,
he could have been much more seriously harmed.
But what bothers Bob even more is that his wife will no longer
make his coffee and cake, which hardly seems fair.
But let's rewind a bit and see how ITS could have changed things.
By using the "terminology" data category, the pharmaceutical company
could provide information about how terms like "Herzinfarkt"
should be translated.
They could also use the "localization note"
data category to tell the translator that the text
needs to be translated for non-specialist readers, like Bob.
With the right translation, Bob would have recognized his symptoms
much earlier and now he could be enjoying his wife's coffee and cake
Instead of eating porridge and drinking carrot juice.
While most cases aren't quite so serious,
ITS can deliver real benefits for people.
So you can use ITS 2.0 to save lives,
but how can you use it to save money?
A good translation is like a good meal.
You don't get it cheap at every fast food shop on the street corner.
You have to visit a good restaurant.
The better the meal, the more people are involved.
From farmers, to food producers, to deliver drivers,
and cooks and waiters,
each plays a role in making sure that the meal is
prepared and cooked in the right way.
Multilingual web content production isn't much different
in terms of its complexity.
You don't normally need to care
about how your food reaches your table.
In the same way, you normally don't need to care
about how web content in your language was created
as long as it conveys the information you need.
But hundreds of people may be involved
in preparing multilingual content for you.
These people will do things like create content in one language,
gather that content and prepare it for translation,
send that content onto translation providers
who then send it out to dozens or even hundreds of translators,
who then translate it into many languages.
Other people will review the quality of the translation
and prepare the layout or handle technical issues.
Communication in these kinds of complex workflows is key to making
things work correctly, on time, and cost-effectively.
This communication can easily overwhelm people and be missed.
And when it is missed, it can lead to very real problems.
Using ITS can help improve the situation.
By embedding ITS metadata in content,
the need for manual management is reduced.
This can reduce costs up to 40 percent and can save 30 to 60 percent
of the time needed to deliver multilingual content without ITS.
ITS 2.0's standardized data categories support
communication in multilingual content production.
At the simple end they might help tell translators
what text needs to be translated.
Or they might support communication in a complex workflow.
In such cases, ITS 2.0's data categories help support automation.
They help integrate content management systems,
machine translation tools,
and the computer tools that help human translators.
All this helps the human players to work together seamlessly
to reduce the overheads that come
with building messages in many languages.
The European Commission supported the development of ITS 2.0.
ITS 2.0 was created in an international effort
by the companies involved in the
Multilingual Web - Language Technology Working Group
at the World Wide Web Consortium.
We had the right people involved to build this standard.
Today companies and individuals are starting to take advantage
of the opportunities offered by ITS 2.0.
They are building the tools needed to bring everyone to the same table
where they understand each other
and can cook a lot of delicious translation meals together.
For more information on how you can use ITS 2.0
and the tools that implement it,
visit the ITS Interest Group wiki
or take a look at our other videos.
Links to these resources can be seen in the description to this video.