"Through language engineering we can find ways of living comfortably with technology. Our knowledge of language can be used to develop systems that recognise speech and writing, understand text well enough to select information, translate between different languages, and generate speech as well as the printed world.
By applying such technologies we have the ability to extend the current limits of our use of language. Language enabled products will become an essential and integral part of everyday life."
A full presentation of language engineering can be found in Language
Engineering: Harnessing the Power of Language.
From 1992 to 1998, the Language Engineering Sector was part of the Telematics Applications Programme of the European Commission. Its aim was to facilitate the use of telematics applications and to increase the possibilities for communication in and between European languages. RTD (research and technological development) work focused on pilot projects that integrated language technologies into information and communications applications and services. A key objective was to improve their ease of use and functionality and broaden their scope across different languages.
From January 1999, the Language Engineering Sector has been rebranded as Human Language Technologies (HLT), a sector of the IST Programme (IST: Information Society Technologies) of the European Commission for 1999-2002. HLTCentral has been set up by the LINGLINK Project as the springboard for access to Language Technology resources on the Web: information, news, downloads, links, events, discussion groups and a number of specially-commissioned studies (e-commerce, telecommunications, Call Centres, Localization, etc.).
The Multilingual Application Interface for Telematic Services (MAITS) is a consortium formed to specify an applications programming interface (API) for multilingual applications in the telematic services. A number of telematic applications, such as X.500, WWW, X.400, internet mail and data bases, is planned to be enhanced to use this i18n API, and products are planned to be implemented using the API.
FRANCIL (Réseau francophone de l'ingénierie de la langue) (Francophone Network in Language Engineering) is a programme launched in June 1994 by the Agence universitaire de la francophonie (AUPELF-UREF) (University Agency for Francophony) to strengthen activities in linguistic engineering, particularly for automatic language processing. This quickly-growing sector includes research and development for text analysis and generation, and for speech recognition, comprehension and synthesis. It also includes some applications in the following fields: document management, communication between the human being and the machine, writing aid, and computer-assisted translation.
5.4. Internationalization and Localization
"Towards communicating on the Internet in any language…" Babel is an Alis Technologies/ Internet Society joint project to internationalize the Internet. Its multilingual site (English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish) has two main sections: languages (the world's languages; typographical and linguistic glossary; Francophonie (French-speaking countries); and the Internet and multilingualism (developing your multilingual Web site; coding the world's writing).
The Localisation Industry Standards Association (LISA) is a main organization for the localization and internationalization industry. The current membership of 130 leading players from all around the world includes software publishers, hardware manufacturers, localization service vendors, and an increasing number of companies from related IT sectors. LISA defines its mission as "promoting the localization and internationalization industry and providing a mechanism and services to enable companies to exchange and share information on the development of processes, tools, technologies and business models connected with localization, internationalization and related topics". Its site is housed and maintained by the University of Geneva, Switzerland.