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Quote from W3C press release: “Creators of XML content can use the ITS set of elements and attributes to prepare schemas and documents for localization and to internationalize them for a global audience.” Or if you want to see real code—the following snippet of DocBook code shows how to use ITS to markup content that should not be translated:

<para xmlns:its="http://www.w3.org/2005/11/its">This software was
written by <personname its:translate="no"><firstname>Jirka</firstname>
<surname>Kosek</surname></personname>.</para>

Of course ITS has much more capabilities, but this is one that probably will be the most often used. Like it, or not, world is globalizing and it is unreasonable to expect that all people will be able (and comfortable!) with one common language—be it English, Esperanto or Chinese. More and more content will be translated and ITS can significantly help in creating content which is well suited for automated translation.

I'm proud that I have convinced other members of ITS WG that NVDL is appropriate technology for ITS validation. ITS markup is generic and thanks to namespaces it can be combined with any other XML vocabulary. Only NVDL language is able to describe this validation constraint with a reasonable effort.

I'm looking forward for further work with this excellent group of localization experts. Next deliverable are Best Practices for XML Internationalization. My duty is to prepare section about integrating ITS markup into DocBook.