Wayne Tseng, MultilingualWeb.com.au
Multilingual Web publishing is a still a relatively new concept, yet it already has many community and commercial applications. Australian businesses and government agencies are using it as a channel to reach out and interact with a growing group of overseas and local ethnic online audiences. They require a dynamic method for creating, translating and deploying large volumes of tailored multilingual Web information.
This created a challenge in providing a dynamic multilingual Web publishing system and a process that allows rapid translation and Web integration of content while meeting W3C standards and removing the need for business users to concern themselves with multilingual character management.
MultilingualWeb.com.au (formerly ITIG) - the selected multilingual Web publishing house for the Sydney Olympic Games Information Web site (http://www.gamesinfo.com.au) is an Australian Multilingual Web publishing and Web Internationalisation organisation.
MultilingualWeb.com.au has met this challenge and defined and implemented a multilingual Web publishing model that facilitates online creation of information by English authors and online translation by native speakers. These tasks and the task of controlling the publishing rules and online status of the content are performed online through a simple workflow mechanism.
The heart of this model is a language enabled data repository that not only stores multilingual texts, but also sorts and indexes the information to support database queries. Native speaking authors can use a suite of language editors to word process the text online, while Web tools provide the encoding assistance. This makes the multilingual data compatible for presentation on the web before it is stored in a database system. With a parallel workflow system built in, content authors and translators can work simultaneously thus eliminating the delay associated with the task relationship "Finish the English information first then translation after".
These ease of enter multilingual content relies on the evaluation and selection of multilingual editors that defines the "Editor Compatibility List".
ITIG's multilingual Web publishing platform - Meridium is an implementation of this model and is already in service powering the Olympics Games Information Web site and other business sites.
ITIG is a private organisation and of course that means focusing on the commercial application of multilingual Web. Our research and multilingual Web development focus on the practical application of the multilingual Web. These applications are also finding its way into the community sections and ethnic publications. Meridium is also used in powering the two major Chinese Newspaper Web site like The Independence Daily.
We are the people behind the multilingual content on the Sydney Olympic Information Web site http://www.gamesinfo.com.au and our multilingual Web publishing system will be used in the upcoming Easter release of the site currently in English http://en.gamesinfo.brainwaave.com.au. Other applications of our methods and technologies includes the ANZ bank http://www.anz.com.au
This presentation is available online