Certainly the most established players in the field are ISO and the IEC, and their Joint Technical Committee, JTC 1, which is responsible for, among other things, character codes (SC 2, ISO/IEC 10646, ISO's mirror standard to Unicode), SGML (SC 34, ISO/IEC 8879), and metadata registries (SC 32, ISO/IEC 11179). National bodies associated with ISO/IEC maintain mirror advisory groups at national levels and also field their own specific standards (ANSI, DIN, ÖNORM, AFNOR, BSI, etc., together with the approximately 200 US specialized groups under the ANSI umbrella, e.g., ASTM, SAE; see ANSI 2005b).

Outside the ISO/IEC environment, special interest groups such as the IETF, IANA, and the W3C govern the Internet and the World Wide Web, respectively. Organizations such as LISA and OASIS are for the most part made up of companies active in the localization industry and in e-business, with both groups producing standards, guides, and metrics for use in localization environments. Some quasi-standards are not even fielded by normative organizations per se: the ATA Standard Framework for Error Marking, for instance, can be used to produce a viable metric for assessing translation quality, but it arose in response to the need to objectively assess performance in the context of translator certification.

3. De facto standards

Other standards are not promulgated by standards organizations or by professional groups. For instance, many functionalities of Microsoft software and the overall Microsoft environment amount to quasi-standards, especially the implementation of HTML as dictated by Microsoft Internet Explorer. Microsoft locale encoding has in the past competed with normative practice, but in recent years Microsoft has become actively involved in a number of standards initiatives, particularly OASIS, Unicode, and the Language Codes. The Linux-related open standards movement (FSG) represents an effort to resist the market dominance of Microsoft, in effect embodying a set of counter-standards that are establishing themselves as an alternative in the marketplace.

It is not unusual for a standard to evolve out of one group (such as the FSG) and move into a broader-based, more prestigious venue, such as the W3C or Unicode. This pattern describes the trajectory of Unicode's Locale Data Markup

Language. In similar fashion, independent and company-based de facto standards not infrequently migrate into the ISO/IEC world, such as has been the case with SGML, Unicode, and more recently, SIL International's Ethnologue resource, which

is becoming the basis for an expanded ISO 639. These kinds of standards grow out of real, core enterprise needs and reflect a concentration of research and development investment within company or organizational contexts that would in many

cases be out of the reach of volunteer organizations like ISO. For instance, SIL's commitment to developing educational and public service resources for speakers of languages that previously had no written form has lead to the systematic codification of all the world's languages within a linguistically oriented framework (as opposed, for instance, to the library classification structure of the current ISO 639-2). Furthermore, the fact that this resource has been openly published on the

Web for many years means that it has already been rigorously vetted by users all over the world, which qualifies it as a mature candidate for standardization.

4. Standards philosophies

The availability and accessibility of standards varies considerably, depending on the source of the standard in question and the marketing and distribution philosophy adopted by each sponsoring group. It is often said that ISO/IEC and their national

affiliates tend to function as publishing houses masquerading as standards organizations. DIN, for instance, maintains a nice distinction between the standards institute and its publishing affiliate, Beuth Verlag, but the internal administration of the standards organizations is still for the most part financed by the sale of standards, and the copyright for these standards is very closely held. (Actual creation of the standards is contributed by experts who are generally financed by industry and government.)

Exceptions to jealous copyright protection include widely used standards such as the multi-section ISO 639 (Language Codes), ISO 3166 (Country Codes), and ISO 15924 (Scripts). In 2003, there was a brief controversy concerning the notion

that the standards organizations might claim royalties for the right to incorporate these codes into software, but serious objections were voiced throughout the computing community, particularly from W3C, from companies like Microsoft,

and from originators of the standards-related content such as SIL and ISO's own TC 37, which co-administers the language codes. The brouhaha abated when ISO reiterated its existing practice that important standards such as these codes would

remain freely available for all types of use and for incorporation into software applications.

IETF and W3C, along with a number of other Web-based groups, freely publish their work on the Web and invite interested experts to participate in the creation of their standards. LISA makes many of its documents available in this way, with the exception of its QA Model, which is configured as a database application, and whose pricing is more in line with niche computer programs than with standards. The marketing of what is essentially a standard in the form of a functional application underscores the fact that printed standards (including the snapshot-style graphic PDF files marketed as "electronic versions" by the traditional standards organizations) are not particularly useful in computing environments. Functional standards in particular have more value and are more likely to be implemented if they are made available in processable electronic form. For instance, a data element standard listing a full metadata registry for a subject domain will be of little utility on paper, but can be accessed according to flexible search strategies, freely subsetted, and/or built directly into applications if the information is available as an xml-based data resource.

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