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Standards

OSCAR, LISA’s Standards Committee

OSCAR Standards
Steering Committee

OSCAR (Open Standards for Container/content Allowing Reuse) is LISA’s open standards body for the translation and localization industry. OSCAR’s goals are:

Development of free and open standards to:
1. support the localization and translation industries,
2. promote the freedom of organizations to reuse their language-related information with multiple partners and technical solutions, and
3. help organizations better achieve their business goals with standard technical solutions.
Promote collaboration between all industry sectors to ensure that standards meet and support a broad range of needs.
Promotion of standards-based solutions (including the certification of standards-based products and processes) to meet business and technical needs in international business.
Partnership with other standards organizations to ensure that the needs of organizations operating internationally are met in the standards produced by those groups.

To meet these goals, OSCAR develops and maintains technical standards related to the linguistic needs of international businesses and their partners. OSCAR standards address core technical and business issues, such as translation memory, terminology management, translation-related text processing, word and text volume counts, and multilingual content management.

Membership in OSCAR’s governing body, the steering committee, is open to LISA members by invitation. Participation in working groups is open to all interested LISA members. OSCAR welcomes feedback from individuals and organizations outside of LISA. To learn more about participation in OSCAR, please contact Arle Lommel at arlego@lisaaway.org. The general public is invited to submit feedback on OSCAR standards and proposals through the channels listed for specific standards and technical committees.

To learn more about individual LISA standards, please follow the links below:

OSCAR Standards

Translation Memory eXchange (TMX). OSCAR’s oldest standard, TMX supports the exchange of translation memory (TM) data between applications.
Segmentation Rules eXchange (SRX). A companion standard to TMX, SRX allows application developers to define how their tools segment text.
Term-Base eXchange (TBX). Based on ISO standards, TBX is the standard for the exchange of structured terminological data.
XML Text Memory (xml:tm). xml:tm allows text memory (including translations) to be embedded within XML documents.
Global Information Management Metrics eXchange - Volume (GMX-V). GMX-V provides a standard way to count characters and words in documents for information management purposes, including estimating translation costs.
Term Link (proposed). Term Link is an XML namespace that enables XML elements to be linked to termbases.

Steering Committee

OSCAR is governed by a steering committee of representatives from LISA member companies. Membership is by member organization with designated representatives.