JW and Swe here with xp volunteering on projects internally!
While not being directly involved with meps development ( there is so many different depts and service to volunteer and help out), I know that the MEPS has always been an umbrella for the multi lingual publishing tools.
At its origin it was a revolutionary system that helped layout, compositing and preprint workflows and scaled to a Hundred something langs an provided features we take for granted today (typesetting and automatic layouting in 120+ Lang’s well before it was cool)
Nowadays it’s highly probable that the meps also encompasses web publishing workflows (now in 1000+ Langs), pdf, Braille and print, using whatever industry standard appropriate and filling the gaps where commercial products fall short ( its a quite unique set of challenge that would stress test any CMS and publishing software)
Finally I have lots of friends working as volunteers in the content translation itself and I’m even more amazed by the quality of training, quality assurance process and attention to detail.
For instance small teams of translators are geographically located where the target language are spoken idiomatically (even for small communities) to ensure smooth and practical translations.
Just imagine having to coordinate hundreds of distributed teams in every single country and region of the world, all volunteers, and maintaining high quality translation while most of translators are locals with only goodwill and no formal training in translation ( sometimes even dictionaries does not exist )
And of course, no corporate backing, and strictly every single member is a volunteer !
While not being directly involved with meps development ( there is so many different depts and service to volunteer and help out), I know that the MEPS has always been an umbrella for the multi lingual publishing tools. At its origin it was a revolutionary system that helped layout, compositing and preprint workflows and scaled to a Hundred something langs an provided features we take for granted today (typesetting and automatic layouting in 120+ Lang’s well before it was cool)
Nowadays it’s highly probable that the meps also encompasses web publishing workflows (now in 1000+ Langs), pdf, Braille and print, using whatever industry standard appropriate and filling the gaps where commercial products fall short ( its a quite unique set of challenge that would stress test any CMS and publishing software)
Finally I have lots of friends working as volunteers in the content translation itself and I’m even more amazed by the quality of training, quality assurance process and attention to detail.
For instance small teams of translators are geographically located where the target language are spoken idiomatically (even for small communities) to ensure smooth and practical translations. Just imagine having to coordinate hundreds of distributed teams in every single country and region of the world, all volunteers, and maintaining high quality translation while most of translators are locals with only goodwill and no formal training in translation ( sometimes even dictionaries does not exist )
And of course, no corporate backing, and strictly every single member is a volunteer !