IGNITE project

2006 October 2
IGNITE project

The IGNITE project is an EU-funded project that began in April 2005 and will run until April 2007. IGNITE will pool together linguistic infrastructure resources and provide convenient access and a market place for them. This will provide a pre-requisite for the success of the European digital content industries.

Background

The protection of Europe’s rich linguistic and cultural heritage in the information age is a major challenge and a real opportunity for business and politics. For European citizens, it is a prerequisite for participation in the information society of this millennium. Since its emergence in the mid-1980s, the localisation industry has developed rapidly into one of the engines of the equal, multilingual and cross-cultural information society. Localisation, widely defined as the linguistic and cultural adaptation of digital content to the requirement of specific markets or locales has changed beyond recognition.

Yet, the localisation industry does not have access to a robust infrastructure comprising language data and tools which are a prerequisite for the timely and cost effective creation and deployment of multilingual, cross-cultural and multimodal digital content. There is an urgent need for the development of the structural basis to make a sustained internationalisation and localisation effort possible, especially for less widely spoken languages.

IGNITE will establish a central and accessible repository of European linguistic resources strongly connected to and supported by the localisation industry – an initiative recommended by experts to the European Commission in a variety of reports and studies (e.g. Export potential and linguistic customisation of digital content products and services, D. Worlock - Chairman Electronic Publishing Services, available at www.cordis.lu, consulted: May 2004; also: New media localisation, a report to the European Commission, Reinhard Schäler, available at www.localisation.ie)

Aims and Objectives

IGNITE aims to:

  • Provide a central repository and a focal point establishing a much needed European linguistic resources initiative for localisation;
  • Demonstrate up-to-date automated workflow models to help European companies adapt to and survive in the constantly changing, highly competitive and globally operating localisation industry;
  • Showcase the exciting side of and commercial opportunities presented by linguistic resources in localisation thus helping to develop a market place for linguistic resources.

IGNITE’s objectives are to:

  • Pool together linguistic infrastructure resources for the localisation industry, including digital content, monolingual and multilingual terminology, translation memories, tools and technologies, as well as relevant standards;
  • Establish a linguistic resources support network within the European localisation industry, including the accession countries, covering digital content publishers, service providers, technology developers, standards bodies and standards verification initiatives – each represented in the consortium;
  • Provide convenient access to relevant linguistic resources for content developers, service providers, as well as suppliers of localisation services and solutions;
  • Develop methodologies for the verification of standards compliance;
  • Implement localisation scenarios in a laboratory environment aimed at demonstrating state-of-the-art, best practice localisation technology and process solutions, and at verifying relevant localisation standards;
  • Work towards the establishment of a market place and a viable linguistic resources provider network for the localisation industry.