Last week I had the great opportunity to go to the W3C Multilingual Web Workshop in Rome. It was a great gathering of standards crafters (from W3C, OASIS, etc.), service providers, academia, EU institutions and implementors.
A wide range of topics were covered. For example, who would have thought representing human names properly is even bigger a problem than date formats. With social services and highly tailored textual feedback these days, this is an important area. I also got insight into the latest thinking on machine translation, and how it is possible to get great results in specific cases and hard to use in others. Poster presenters, such as Easyling (fellow Hungarians) showed interesting new thinking and tools for translation. There were great use case presentations from poetry translation to showing the Spanish tax office and the Food and Agriculture Organization multilingual site redesign.
