To be stored, processed and displayed by a computer, every character – alphabetic letter, ideogram, punctuation, number, symbol – needs to be represented by a number. What Unicode (http://www.unicode.org) does is to assign a unique number to every different character, currently over 100,000 of them. This avoids possible conflicts between different encoding schemes which represent the same character by different numbers or different characters by the same number, leading to corruption as data is passed from one application to another. Unicode is the character encoding standard for XML and has been widely adopted by global organizations, since its use can hugely facilitate software localization. Open source (http://www.opensource.org) extends this concern with sharable, reusable resources to program code. While open-source activity in translation technology remains relatively low, there are some notable exceptions in MT and TM and we can expect this model of software development to become more widespread in translation, to the benefit of translators in developing countries among others.

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