The Future of LISA’s Technology standards

At the end of February 2011, LISA, the Localization Industry Standards Association, announced it was insolvent and was closing the organisation. LISA has been around since 1990 and it is interesting to note that all of the translation companies who were involved in founding LISA (Berlitz, Mendez, Softrans, Stream International and Bull International Localization Organization) no longer exist as separate companies.

For me, and I think many others, the most important part of LISA’s work was on standards development. They managed to attract a number of people at any early stage who made an important contribution to the development of technology standards for our industry. The three most important LISA standards are TBX, TMX and SRX. The other standards which LISA’s OSCAR group worked on are:

• Global information management Metrics eXchange (GMX) - Standard word and character counts for consistent costing and estimating.
• XML text memory (xml:tm) - For storing text and translation memory in XML documents.
• Term Link - The lightweight standard for linking XML documents to terminology resources.

All the LISA standards are important but GMX, xml:tm and Term Link are not as well developed or widely used as TBX, TMX and SRX and may not have the momentum to attract people to continue developing them.

It is clear that the LISA standards or the ideas behind the standards benefit the translation industry and at the very least TBX, TMX and SRX should continue to be developed in some way.

TBX has already been approved as an ISO standard and ISO TC37 will presumably lead its future development.

The closure of LISA may give an opportunity for some consolidation among standards development. For a relatively small industry we have a lot of standards but very few people actually involved in developing them. I have been involved with the development of XLIFF since the beginning and this standard is unusual in that you have a vibrant, active and enthusiastic technical committee developing it. There have been far fewer people involved in the OSCAR standards committee at LISA. There has also been problem for some time and that is getting work done on these standards. The most recent revision of TMX was published in 2005. At the time there was a lot of discussion about TMX 2.0 and plans for a major revision but instead only minor changes were made.

I doubt if there would be many objections if one of the effects of LISA’s closure was to consolidate XLIFF, TMX and SRX. XLIFF is already capable of being used as an exchange format for translation memory which is what TMX does. Some experts have commented that one thing missing from XLIFF is an ability to list the segmentation rules. SRX would provide that. A consolidation like this would also deal with the problem of not having the people to develop the standard. Many of those involved in OSCAR are also members of the XLIFF TC. The translation industry would benefit by consolidation of these standards and I hope it is something which LISA and OASIS looks at very supportively.