By
Peter Reynolds
Bowne Global Solutions &
OASIS Translation Web Services Technical Committee
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Founded in
2003, OASIS’s Translation Web Services Technical
Committee has been actively pursuing standards
to facilitate communication between partners in
the localization process and help eliminate some
of the most time-consuming management tasks that
those involved in localization face. In this article
Peter Reynolds, chair of the Technical Committee,
discusses the rationale for Translation Web Services,
the evolving specification, and future plans to
extend the benefits of Web Services to all those
involved in localization.
Building
and managing multilingual Web sites or other applications
involves many interrelated and complex tasks. Publishers
may have databases, content management systems and
other tools which enable them to manage their original
content, while vendors may have systems to manage
translation such as translation memory systems,
terminology tools and project management systems.
Wonderful flowcharts can be presented to show how
all these systems work together, but system A on
the publisher side and system B on the vendor side
rarely work together as smoothly as simple diagrams
indicate: while the flowchart might show a straight
line from one system to another, the reality is
that files are being transferred by FTP, e-mail,
or other means, while instructions are being communicated
between the various parties through a variety of
inconsistent means, including verbal instruction,
e-mail, read-me files.
Web Services is an
answer to the problem of systems integration. It
uses Internet technologies to allow computer-based
systems to communicate and transfer data in a seamless
and automated manner. Web Services are currently
being adopted by many companies and industries,
and over the next few years will increasingly automate
processes and integrate systems. The OASIS Translation
Web Services Technical Committee is creating a standard
way for Web Services to be used within the translation
and localization industry. This article describes
the Web Services technology and provides a real
life case study showing how it is now being used.
The idea of a standard
for Web Services within translation was first put
forward by Bill Looby of IBM in Limerick, Ireland
at the eLocalisation 2001 conference. Mr. Looby
delivered a paper which showed a vision of how the
industry could benefit from a common way of using
this technology. The conference also included a
practical demonstration of how Web Services were
already being used: Bowne Global Solutions (then
Berlitz GlobalNET) gave a demonstration of work
being done for the 2003 Special Olympics Web site,
which it sponsored. Using Web Services, an XLIFF
(XML Localization Interchange File Format) file
was sent from the Web site to Elcano, Bowne’s
online translation service, and back to the Web
site.
This conference ended
with a small group of people getting together to
look at how they could progress with the idea of
using Web Services within the translation industry.
The steering group formed at that time decided that
OASIS,
as the standards body most involved with Web Services,
would be the natural home for their efforts. OASIS
was established in 1993 and is focused on XML standards
for the IT industry. XLIFF was already being developed
by an OASIS Technical Committee, and there was considerable
support for the localization industry within OASIS.
The OASIS Technical Committee was formed at the
beginning of 2003 and members included representatives
from Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, Connect Global Solutions,
thebigword, LISA, LRC, and Bowne Global Solutions,
as well as individual members.
What is Web Services?
Before detailing the
main features in the draft specification from the
Translation Web Services Technical Committee, I
would like to give some background on Web Services.
The World Wide Web is a collection of interlinked
documents which sits on the Internet, a huge computer
network. Traditionally Web sites were accessed by
a person at a computer, who viewed pages with a
Web browser. With Web Services, in contrast, the
Internet is used for machine-to-machine communication,
rather than for machine-to-person communication.
Protocols such as HTTP and standards such as XML
and SOAP are combined in Web Services to enable
this machine-to-machine communication, enabling
different systems to work together and allowing
for more powerful functionality and automation.
A simple example of
a Web service shows how a home gardener might use
a web service to automatically water his garden
while he is on vacation. If a weather forecasting
company created a Web service and allowed it to
be accessed, weather forecasts could be queried
by remote computers all over the Internet, based
on an XML document called a WSDL (Web service definition
language) that describes the services available
and what parameters will be sent and received for
each of these calls. A protocol called SOAP (simple
object access protocol) handles the queries themselves,
and while the gardening enthusiast is away, his
computer could query the web service to determine
if it will rain that day, and control his water
sprinkler accordingly.
Translation Web Services
Since January 2003,
the Translation Web Services Technical Committee
has been working to create a standard way for Web
Services to be used in a multilingual context. It
has concentrated on creating a standard relating
to the communication between publisher and vendor
companies. At the simplest level this will allow
for translation and other work to be sent by the
publisher to the vendor and, once translated, sent
back. The draft specification covers the following
areas:
- Service support.The
service support functionality allows queries
concerning which languages and types of work
the vendor offers through Web Services. Web
Services allows for the use of a directory of
available and registered services called a UDDI,
which can be used in conjunction with service
support functionality.
- Translation and request
quote. These are the calls which enable
the publisher to submit documents and receive
quotes. Documents can be submitted either after
a quote has been requested and received or as
part of an ongoing relationship where the cost
of any individual job will be known to the publisher.
The quote is based on information such as the
language pairs, what sort of work is to be performed,
and the size of the documents.
- Status, notification and
delivery. These calls enable the publisher
to query the vendor’s Web Services and
determine the status of documents. Document
status could be automatically polled at regular
intervals to provide status information. When
the status changes to “complete,”
the documents can be delivered.
- Reference files. In
the translation process, reference material
such as translation memories, previous translations
and glossaries are essential tools for translators.
These calls allow for the association of reference
material with a particular job.
- Security. The draft
specification requires security around identification
and data transfer. Identification provides a
way to authenticate each party via security
tokens such as username/password, Kerberos tickets
or x.509 certificate. Data transfer security
could be achieved using SSL (Secure Socket Layer).
It is the intention of the Technical Committee
to stay current with the work of the OASIS WS-Security
group and, where appropriate, implement its
recommendations.
Web Services in Action
Although the specification
from the Translation Web Services Technical Committee
is still at the draft stage, there has been some
significant work done with Web Services in the translation
industry. Bowne Global Solutions has implemented
a number of solutions based on Web Services which
have linked content management and other systems
with Elcano, its online translation portal.
The diagram above shows
a solution which was built for a large chemical
company. Its translation process was time-consuming
and error-prone. The process required more than
forty separate manual steps for each file to be
translated. This led to a localization process that
was not cost-effective and where delivery to target
markets was unnecessarily delayed.
Working together with
the company and its systems integrator, Bowne was
able to propose a solution to standardize and automate
parts of the process, reduce the manual effort required,
and provide a more cost-effective and time-efficient
way to translate the content stored within the TeamSite
CMS (Content Management System).
The solution BGS proposed
to the company was to connect Interwoven’s
TeamSite to Elcano™.
Elcano offers a Web Services interface providing
simple and direct programmatic access to Elcano
from any CMS or content repository. The Elcano Web
Services solution makes use of two language industry
standards - both under the auspices of OASIS. XLIFF
defines the structure of translation data, and Translation
Web Services defines the communication between TeamSite
and Elcano. Using these data transfer standards
to connect to Elcano allows source content of any
type to be posted directly into Bowne’s translation
production process, its status to be tracked from
the CMS during translation and, for completed translations
to be retrieved without unnecessary manual intervention.
In addition, once extracted from the CMS, BGS can
make use of a variety of translation productivity
tools to ensure the consistency, accuracy, and timeliness
of the translation.
Conclusion
The idea that companies
which are competing aggressively with each other
should come together and put considerable effort
into agreeing on a common standard might be a curious
one. However, there are many examples where creating
an industry standard benefits everyone. Companies
as large as IBM, Oracle and Microsoft have recognized
that there are areas where they benefit greatly
by working on common standards. Within our industry,
standards such as XLIFF and TMX have greatly helped
us in our work. The Translation Web Services standard
provides the road whereby a customer can travel
to the various vendors. Making it possible to relatively
easily change vendors ensures that the power is
with the customers. All vendor companies want a
long and successful relationship with their clients,
but this should be based on their adding value to
the customers work and not the fact that it is difficult
to change from one vendor to another.
Translation Web Services
will work with other standards by providing them
with the means of transferring content. In the case
study above I showed how Bowne was extracting an
XLIFF file from a database. The view taken by the
committee has been to use other standards where
appropriate rather than re-inventing something which
has already been done well by someone else. Where
appropriate, other Web Services standards such as
Web Services Security will be used within this standard,
and localization standards such as XLIFF or TMX
can be transferred using the standard.
The Translation Web
Service standard Technical Committee has just completed
(May 2004) a face-to-face meeting which was held
in the Dublin offices of Bowne Global Solutions.
During this meeting, the committee agreed on a draft
specification which will, after a review period,
be proposed as a committee specification. This is
the first step towards it becoming a standard which
can be used within the translation industry. The
roadmap for achieving this is for the committee
specification to be agreed to by the beginning of
the summer. After there has have been a number of
implementations, we will start the work in the autumn
to make it an OASIS standard.
Peter Reynolds
works in Bowne Global Solutions Dublin office as
manager of the software development team. His team
is responsible for developing some of the software
which BGS uses to run its business. Peter is secretary
of the XLIFF technical committee, and chair of the
Translation Web Services technical committee, and
has been active in both since their inception. Peter
holds an MBA from the Open University.
Reprinted
by permission from the Globalization Insider,
17 June 2004, Volume XIII, Issue 2.3.
Copyright
the Localization Industry Standards Association
(Globalization Insider: www.localization.org,
LISA: www.lisa.org)
and S.M.P. Marketing Sarl (SMP) 2004
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