Localization International Standard Association (LISA) , an international language organization with a great reputation, announced it would stop operation due to its insolvency on 28, February 2011. LISA emailed members notice of this news earlier of the same day.

And some scheduled activities of LISA, including the LISA Asia Forum to be held in Beijing from 31, May to 1, June was also canceled. On LISA’s official website, a message says, “Though LISA suffered financial problems as an organization, we will persistently explore new approaches to make our contributions to the advance of the language industry.”

The Chief Strategy Officer of Common Sense Advisory, a famous American language industry investigation organization, published in his blog his analysis on the reasons for LISA’s predicament.

He pointed out that LISA has deviated from its key competitiveness as a “standard organization”, specifically marked by LISA’s great involvement in every aspect of Globalization and Localization, which posed itself many competitors and then financial crisis.

About LISA

Founded in 1990 in Switzerland as a private, non-profit association, LISA is now the premier organization for the localization and internalization industry. LISA defines its mission as promoting the localization and internationalization industry and providing a mechanism and services to enable companies to exchange and share information on the development of processes, tools, technologies, and business models connected with localization, internationalization, and related topics.

The current membership of 400 leading players from all around the world includes software publishers, hardware manufacturers, globalization solutions providers, and an increasing number of companies from related IT sectors. The Members work directly or indirectly on the creation of multilingual software, documentation, and multimedia products. Above and beyond this, information services are available to non-members on a fee basis.

LISA’s Latest Initiative

Teaming up with industry thought leaders(IBM, Welocalize, Cisco, and Linux Solution Group), LISA is announcing the OpenTM2 project. Not only does OpenTM2 provide a public and open implementation of a translation workbench environment that serves as the reference implementation of existing localization industry standards, such as TMX, it also aims to provide standardized access to globalization process management software.

Along with LISA’s stated mission on localization industry standards, this initiative provides LISA the opportunity to reinvigorate existing localization standards with an open reference implementation.

With OpenTM2, LISA expects this open initiative to revolutionize the ecosystem and bring real business values to both the service providers and consumers. “The announcement of OpenTM2 is a critical step toward providing a true open exchange environment for translation software technologies,” said Arle Lommel, LISA’s head of Open Standards Activities. “It is very encouraging to see open standards being pushed to the forefront of the globalization business.

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