On Tuesday 17^th November 2009, at the 4^th Internet Governance Summit in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, eight stakeholders working in the area of multilingualism and the internet agreed to form a new Dynamic Coalition for a Global Localisation Platform.

They are:

• The Rosetta Foundation (Reinhard Schäler)
• ICANN (Kieran McCarthy)
• Welocalize / Globalsight (Smith Yewell)
• DotSUB (Michael Smolens)
• Translate.org.za (Dwayne Bailey)
• Arabize (Manal Amin)
• National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences Pakistan (Sarmad Hussain)
• Translators without Borders (Lori Thicke)

They were joined by:

• Adobe (Francis Tsang)
• AOL (Stephen Roantree)

Since November 2009, the following joined:

Organisations

• CES Felipe II
• docSolution
• EasyLSP
• FGD Tanzania Limited
• Global textware bv
• ITAS Corp.
• Logrus International
• StorePOINT International Ltd
• University of Moratuwa
• Urdu Internet Council
• XML-INTL

Individuals

• Daniel Goldshmidt
• Laura Nelson
• Ruben de la Fuente

The coalition, organized as a working group, will coordinate the development of communities and the deployment of technologies that will enable localization for all. Localization, the linguistic and cultural adaptation of digital content, is a prerequisite to make the multilingual and multicultural knowledge society a reality and to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals. Participation in the knowledge society and “access to information in your language” is not a “nice-to-have”, it is a fundamental human right. In many cases, access (or the lack of it) can be a matter of life or death, as in the case of information on HIV/Aids prevention or in cases of justice and legal rights. The coalition’s aim is to add a social, cultural, political and developmental dimension to mainstream commercial localization efforts, to move localization from a mono-dimensional to a multi-dimensional activity, encouraging and supporting localization activities whose rationale is not short-term profit, but long term societal impact.

The coalition will have a major, very direct and practical impact on making multilingual content available on the internet. The establishment of the coalition was only possible through the facilitation of the IGF. The coalition would like to thank the organizers and supporters of the IGF for their hard work to make this gathering such a successful event.

Finally, we would like to invite all those interested in supporting the work of the coalition to join us in our efforts to create an Internet that speaks your language a reality.

To join the Dynamic Coalition click here. The password to access the form is "password".

For further information contact Reinhard.Schaler "at" therosettafoundation.org.

To join the mailing list, please click here. The password required to sign up is “localization”.

Reports

Report of the Inaugural Meeting of the DCGLP