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The 29th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2011) will be held in Hyderabad, India between 28 March and 1 April, 2011. It will include a W3C track dedicated to encouraging the development of the Web across languages, scripts and cultures.

The W3C is running an Accessible and Multilingual Web Camp on 30 March. Attendees will be able to discuss issues and topics in breakout groups as well as hearing prepared talks.

If you are interested in participating, please confirm your interest in the related wiki for this developer camp. Please do suggest discussion topics as well!

(A partnership program is also available, providing various benefits.)

One of the most popular Opera extensions is Translate, which translates a page using an automatic service. But some pages have already been translated, and checked for quality manually. HTML has provided markup to make this clear (rel="alternate" hreflang="xx" as attributes to a link) for more than a decade, but this has not been implemented in browsers, which makes it hard for users to discover.

The new Opera extension Swaplang, developed specifically for the MLW project, is an example of how a browser might natively implement this functionality. If a page uses the proper HTML markup, it shows that there are alternatives available and lets you select between them. To try it, go to the Swaplang download page with Opera 11 (or higher) and install it

If you need a test page, try Character Encodings.

The extension is still in development, with some enhancements expected. The source code is available under the Apache 2.0 open source license, in case you would rather take it in your own directions...

La marca de orden de bytes (BOM) en HTML (The byte-order mark (BOM) in HTML)

Declaración de codificaciones de caracteres en HTML (Declaring character encodings in HTML)

Normalización en HTML y CSS (Normalization in HTML and CSS)

These articles were translated into Spanish thanks to Spanish Translation Services, Trusted Translations, Inc.

[search keys:  qa-byte-order-mark qa-html-encoding-declarations qa-html-css-normalization ]

Zeichencodierungen (Character encodings)

HTML und XHTML ausliefern (Serving HTML & XHTML)

Verwendung von b- und i-Elementen (Using b and i elements)

The translations of the following articles were also updated.

Zeichencodierung für Anfänger (Character encodings for beginners)

Verwendung von Zeichen-Escapes in Markup und CSS (Using character escapes in markup and CSS)

These articles were translated into German thanks to Gunnar Bittersmann. [search keys: article-o-charset article-serving-xhtml qa-b-and-i-tags qa-what-is-encoding qa-escapes ]

4-5 April 2011, Pisa, Italy. Hosted jointly by the Istituto di Informatica e Telematica and Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche.

The MultilingualWeb project is looking at best practices and standards related to all aspects of creating, localizing and deploying the Web multilingually. The project aims to raise the visibility of existing best practices and standards and identify gaps. The core vehicle for this is a series of four events which are planned for the coming two years.

After the highly successful workshop in Madrid last year, this workshop will continue to survey currently available best practices and standards aimed at helping content creators, localizers, tools developers, and others meet the challenges of the multilingual Web.

Participation is free. We welcome participation from both speakers and non-speaking attendees. For more information, see the Call for Participation

Bidi- Pierdere de spatii (Bidi space loss)

HTML, XHTML, XML si Codurile de Control (HTML, XHTML, XML and Control Codes)

Cand sa folosim negocierea limbajului (When to use language negotiation)

These articles were translated into Romanian thanks to Costea Marian. [search keys: qa-bidi-space qa-controls qa-when-lang-neg]

A report summarising the MultilingualWeb workshop in Madrid is now available from the MultilingualWeb site. Alongside the summaries are links to slides, video recordings, and the IRC log for each speaker and the discussion sessions.

Entitled "The Multilingual Web: Where are We?", the workshop surveyed and shared information about currently available best practices and standards that can help content creators and localizers address the needs of the multilingual Web, including the Semantic Web. Attendees also heard about gaps that need to be addressed, and enjoyed opportunities to network and share information between the various different communities involved in enabling the multilingual Web. Just over a hundred people attended.

The site also has pointers to blog posts, tweets and photos as well as other information related to the workshop.

Building on the success of the Madrid workshop, preparations have now begun for the next workshop, to be held in Pisa, Italy, in March 2011. A Call for Participation will be issued soon.

RFC 6067 specifies an extension to BCP 47. BCP 47 provides subtags that specify language and/or locale-based behavior.

Many locale identifiers require additional "tailorings" or options for specific values within a language, culture, region, or other variation. This extension provides a mechanism for using these additional tailorings within language tags for general interchange.

The maintaining authority for the extension defined by this document is the Unicode Consortium. The Unicode Consortium defines a standardized, structured set of locale data and identifiers for locale data in the "Common Locale Data Repository" or "CLDR".

Web sites internacionais & multilíngues (International & multilingual web sites)

This article was translated into Brazilian Portuguese thanks to Matheus Salmi, CZ SEE. [search keys: qa-international-multilingual]

Zweibuchstabige oder dreibuchstabige Sprachcodes (Two-letter or three-letter language codes)

This article was translated into German thanks to Gunnar Bittersmann. [search keys: qa-lang-2or3]