The Unicode Consortium announces a new technical committee, the Unicode Localization Interoperability Technical Committee. Localization of software information is a key part of the adoption of most software offerings in many countries. The purpose of the new committee is to ensure interoperable data interchange for critical localization-related assets, such as language segmentation, translation source strings, translated strings, and translation memories.

The initial focus of the Unicode Localization Interoperability (ULI) Technical Committee is on the improved interoperability of translation memories in the TMX format, segmentation rules that use the SRX format, and translation source strings and resulting translated strings that use the XLIFF format.

The ULI Technical Committee will establish profiles of use for TMX, SRX, and XLIFF. The committee will develop and publish specifications that document specific usage conventions that can be shared for interoperability. This will improve data interchange through more consistent implementations and will enhance the usefulness of these three standards.

For information on how to join the ULI effort and get involved in its work, contact the Unicode Consortium with the contact form (see http://www.unicode.org/reporting.html) and ask about the ULI.

To become a voting participant in the work of the ULI committee, join Unicode in one of the three voting categories of membership: Full, Institutional, or Supporting. See http://www.unicode.org/consortium/join.html .

For more details about the ULI, see: http://unicode.org/uli/