OASIS has issued a Call for Participation in a new Translation Web Services Technical Committee. The purpose of the Translation Web Services TC is "to define industry standard business process terminology which will then drive the development of an industry standard WSDL file and UDDI business service entries. The TC will define the service types that are relevent to the software/content localisation and translation industry. These will be defined and published within a specification with a public call for comment. A key objective of the Translation Web Services TC will be to establish a set of business process terminology that the software/content localisation and translation industries shall find to be comprehensive and complete. For example it is possible that a publisher would like a document translated and wants to use Web Services to achieve this. One vendor could use the text 'translation' for the translation task, another might use 'trans' another 'trns'. The TWS business process terminology specification will ensure that when a publisher submits a document to be translated they use one set of terminology that is universally understood by all vendors providing the service." The TC Chair is Peter Reynolds (Bowne Global Solutions). The first meeting of the TC is January 16, 2003.

From the 2002-11-22 anouncement:

The TWS TC is proposing to lead the software and content localisation and translation to define industry standard business process terminology which will then drive the development of an industry standard WSDL file and UDDI business service entries.

The first phase of the workgroup will be to define the service types that are relevent to the software/content localisation and translation industry. These will be defined and published within a specification with a public call for comment.

The second phase will be to define the service types in the first phase, and describe them with service interface definition WSDL documents. This will be done for each of the areas covered. For example human translation services may have a separate WSDL to machine translation services.

During the third phase, the WSDL documents will be published as UDDI tModels with the overviewDoc field in each of these tModels pointing to the relevant WSDL documents.

Relationship with XLIFF: The Translation Web Services TC is working within the same industry as the OASIS XLIFF TC and it is hoped that there will be a close working relationship between the two TCs. It is likely that XLIFF will be one of the formats which is transported using Web Services based on the work of the Translation Web Services TC but it will not be the only format and the TC will not presume that XLIFF will be used.

TC Proposers:

• Tony Jewtushenko, Tony.Jewtushenko@oracle.com, Oracle Corporation Ireland
• Peter Reynolds, Peter.Reynolds@bowneglobal.ie, Bowne Global Solutions
• Bill Looby, Bill_Looby@ie.ibm.com, IBM Ireland
• Gerard Cattin des Bois, gcatt@windows.microsoft.com, Microsoft USA
• Paul Quigley, paul.quigley@keyperformancesolutions.co, Individual Member
• Jaap van der Meer, jd.vandermeer@quicknet.nl, Individual Member