ABSTRACT

Standards for the language, translation, and localization industries, and for language products such as terminology and lexicography resources, technical writing, and annotated text corpora, as well as codes used in identifying languages have evolved over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, expanding in scope and significance with the growing computerization of text and data across all environments of human activity and in a burgeoning number of human languages. This retrospective review covers primarily standards of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), as well as related national and regional institutes and industrial standards elaborated by professional bodies and by entities like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), but also considers the work of associations such as the Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA), the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) and UNICODE. It touches on the application of process and product criteria to the translation and localization environment. This chapter chronicles a progression from engineers standardizing vocabulary to serve the purpose of engineering-oriented standardization to linguists applying computer engineering principles for the purpose of controlling and analysing language, and ultimately, of engineering knowledge.