Internationalization Tag Set - Overview

Overview

ITS v1.0 includes seven data categories:

• Translate: Defines what parts of a document are translatable or not.
• Localization Note: Provides alerts, hints, instructions, and other information to help the localizers or the translators.
• Terminology: Indicates parts of the documents that are terms and optionally pointers to information about these terms.
• Directionality: Indicates what type of display directionality should be applied to parts of the document.
• Ruby: Indicates what parts of the document should be displayed as ruby text. (Ruby is a short run of text alongside a base text, typically used in East Asian documents to indicate pronunciation or to provide a brief annotation).
• Language Information: Identifies the language of the different parts of the document.
• Elements Within Text: Indicates how elements should be treated with regard to linguistic segmentation.

The vocabulary is designed to work on two different fronts: First by providing markup usable directly in the XML documents. Secondly, by offering a way to indicate if there are parts of a given markup that correspond to some of the ITS data categories and should be treated as such by ITS processors.

ITS applies to both new document types as well as existing ones. It also applies to both markups without any internationalization features as well as the class of documents already supporting some internationalization or localization-related functions.

ITS can be specified using global rules and local rules.

• The global rules are expressed anywhere in the document (embedded global rules), or even outside the document (external global rules), using the its:rules element.
• The local rules are expressed by specialized attributes (and sometimes elements) specified inside the document instance, at the location where they apply.