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TONY HARTLEY7.1 INFRASTRUCTURE TECHNOLOGIES‘Technology’ is not only hardware and software tools; it includes collectionsof techniques that enable humans to produce goods and services and, moregenerally, control the environment. This section describes some of the less‘visible’ technologies that underpin the globalization environment by makingit possible to create and share translation data. Without them the emergingtrend towards massive online translation (section 7.7) would be simplyimpossible.7.1.1 XML AND FAMILYOne of the most powerful technologies providing a platform for globalizationis eXtensible Markup Language (XML – http://www.w3.org/XML). Thereason it is so important is that it is increasingly the medium in which text isdelivered for translation and in which translation resources are shared.While HTML indicates how information is to be displayed in a browser,XML describes what pieces of information mean. The tags that mark upthe information are designed to be self-explanatory, as shown in Figure 7.1.By separating data from its display and from proprietary formats and by assigningit meaningful labels, XML simplifies the transport and sharing of contentacross otherwise incompatible platforms. It also makes content more accessibleby making it available, for example, to devices that can ‘publish’ it as textfor the Deaf and as speech for the blind. Thus, XML is at the heart of thesemantic web (http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/).The set of tags is not closed but extensible, allowing communities of usersto agree on the definition of new tags for particular applications. In otherwords, XML is a metalanguage, used to create many new languages in differentdomains of knowledge and activity. Among the most important ofthese for globalization are XLIFF, TBX, TMX and DITA (section 7.3.1) –all actively promoted by the Localisation Industry Standards Association(http://www.lisa.org) and OASIS (http://www.oasis-open.org).XLIFF (XML Localisation Interchange File Format) is designed to overcomeproblems of interoperability between the many tools that have a placeSamJoMeetingThis takes place at 12 today.FIGURE 7.1 Example XML tags (http://www.w3schools.com)108