Comment Re:Translation from a belgian (Score 2, Informative) 106
The articles on the government website in french and dutch.
So you want someone to translate them ?
Here is my (I am a Dutch, French and English speaking Belgian) translation:
Use open standards for the exchange of office documents.
The council of ministers approved the law-suggestion (I don't know the English word) for the use of open standards for the exchange of office documents.
Minister Vanvelthoven: The exchange of office documents such as text documents and spreadsheets has been especially based on popular officeprograms such as Microsoft Office, Corel WordPerfect Office, etc. in recent times.
But most of the time, documents which are made with these products can only be read by those products. Therefore, when you want to exchange such documents with someone else you oblige him/her almost to also buy the office software with which the original document has been made. To reduce being dependent on those ' company-owned ' formats it is necessary to use an open standard as an exchange format.
XML is such a standard for exchanging information between several computer systems. A document based on XML is therefore a guarantee of accessibility of information in the long term. The Opendocument Format (ODF) is a XML-based document format that is accepted by the ISO (international Standards Organization). Therefore we suggest to use ODF as a standard for exchanging office documents such as editors, spreadsheets, ... after it is definitively approved by the ISO.
Each government (the government in Belgium is pretty complex for such a small country, it can be divided in 3 'gewesten' or in 3 'gemeenschappen' or in 10 'provincies'.) must ensure by September 2007 that ODF documents can be read. This does not exclude the use of other formats. How the 'read-functionality' will be guaranteed is something that each government can choose. Depending on the results of an impactanalysis carried out by Fedict (this is a service of the goverment that is responsible for doing things like this and other things that waste tax money :) ) as from September 2008 ODF will be used as a standard format for the exchange of office documents.
So you want someone to translate them ?
Here is my (I am a Dutch, French and English speaking Belgian) translation:
Use open standards for the exchange of office documents.
The council of ministers approved the law-suggestion (I don't know the English word) for the use of open standards for the exchange of office documents.
Minister Vanvelthoven: The exchange of office documents such as text documents and spreadsheets has been especially based on popular officeprograms such as Microsoft Office, Corel WordPerfect Office, etc. in recent times.
But most of the time, documents which are made with these products can only be read by those products. Therefore, when you want to exchange such documents with someone else you oblige him/her almost to also buy the office software with which the original document has been made. To reduce being dependent on those ' company-owned ' formats it is necessary to use an open standard as an exchange format.
XML is such a standard for exchanging information between several computer systems. A document based on XML is therefore a guarantee of accessibility of information in the long term. The Opendocument Format (ODF) is a XML-based document format that is accepted by the ISO (international Standards Organization). Therefore we suggest to use ODF as a standard for exchanging office documents such as editors, spreadsheets,
Each government (the government in Belgium is pretty complex for such a small country, it can be divided in 3 'gewesten' or in 3 'gemeenschappen' or in 10 'provincies'.) must ensure by September 2007 that ODF documents can be read. This does not exclude the use of other formats. How the 'read-functionality' will be guaranteed is something that each government can choose. Depending on the results of an impactanalysis carried out by Fedict (this is a service of the goverment that is responsible for doing things like this and other things that waste tax money
