Why words need accompanying information
An isolated string rarely tells a translator everything needed to handle it correctly. A product name may need to remain unchanged. A short label may refer to an action rather than an object. A reviewer may need to know which tool produced a proposed translation.
Our practical interest in ITS is the ability to make such information explicit and transferable. It is a metadata layer, not a replacement for the content or the people deciding what the instructions mean.
An illustrative instruction problem
A help page contains a product name, a code example and explanatory prose. A translation task should treat those elements differently. The team also has a note explaining that “workspace” means a product-specific object.
Our suggested exercise is to list the instructions that a translator would otherwise have to infer. Then check whether the extraction and receiving tools retain the relevant information. Test the path from source content to translation environment and back, rather than assuming metadata survives every conversion.
This scenario is an original example. It does not provide a complete ITS implementation or formal test case.
Connection to quality evaluation
ITS can carry quality-related information. That is different from deciding whether a reported issue is truly an error or calculating the final acceptance result. A metadata vocabulary and an evaluation method solve related but distinct problems.
When a finding moves between systems, our recommendation is to preserve enough information for a reviewer to understand what was flagged and why. Avoid converting uncertain suggestions into confirmed errors merely because a destination field expects a value.
Relationship to LISA and AI
ITS is a W3C development in the wider localization ecosystem, not a LISA specification. Its relevance to the LISA story lies in making multilingual production more interoperable.
For AI-assisted work, traceable instructions and provenance are especially useful design concerns. However, recording a tool's identity does not establish the correctness of its output. Keep the distinction between process metadata and quality evidence visible.
Source record and related reading
ITS 2.0 Recommendation and publication history. The age of a stable specification does not by itself establish or refute support in a particular product.