Re: XLIFF tools

[Nicolas François <nicolas.francois@centraliens.net>]

Hello,

Here is a list of XLIFF related tools:

 * Transolution
   http://transolution.python-hosting.com/
   an XLIFF editor with filters for SGML based formats (HTML, XML,
   Docbook, OpenOffice) and PO. It also provides a Translation Memory
   server (which can use TMX files), and a tool to convert XLIFF to TMX.
 * xlifftool
   http://xliff-tools.freedesktop.org/wiki/Projects/xlifftool
   It permits to convert PO to XLIFF and XLIFF to PO.
   It also provides xlfpoinit and xlfpomerge, the equivalent of msginit
   and msgmerge, for XLIFF files.
   I don't think these tools support all XLIFF files. It seems it only
   support XLIFF that were converted from a PO.

   There are also some Java filters: xliff-tools.
   I did not tried them.
 * OmegaT
   http://www.omegat.org/omegat/omegat.html
   A translator GUI. It supports tag based formats (HTML, OpenOffice) and
   plain text. It can use and generate a TMX. It generate the translated
   documents and the XLIFF.
   I'm not sure it can be packaged for Debian (requires Swing, requires an
   Apple's .jar)
   Also the dependency chain is quite important.
 * omegat+
   http://omegatplus.sourceforge.net/
   It seems this one don't have the same dependencies than OmegaT. It
   should be easier to package on Debian. I don't know if it is as
   complete as OmegaT (or maybe more complete).
 * XML-TMX
   http://search.cpan.org/~ambs/XML-TMX-0.13/lib/XML/TMX.pm
   Perl extensions for managing TMX files. It provides some TMX
   manipulation modules and the following scripts:
   po2tmx - convert POs to XLIFFs?
   tmx2tmx - can probably act like the msgcat tool
   tmx2html - can display a TMX
   tmxsplit - split the TMX per language
 * translate-toolkit (pootle)
   Already in Debian.
   It provides filters to convert PO to other formats, and provides the
   po2tmx, po2xliff and xliff2po utilities.
   These utility are marked as beta.
 * SUN's open-language-tools
   https://open-language-tools.dev.java.net/
   It is licensed under CDDL. It can't entre main currently. I don't know
   if it could be shiped in non-free in Debian.
   I've not tried it.

With xlifftool, we can probably convert any PO to create an XLIFF file.
However, I'm not sure we can do the reverse conversion with any XLIFF
file.

Maybe translate-toolkit's tools are better.

Clytie (and others), you mentioned a good XLIFF2PO. Is it one of the above?
Also, did you encountered any issue due to providing POs to
LocFactoryEditor? Would the translations be easier if we could provide you
XLIFF files instead of POs?

If you want to tests this softwares, I've made Debian packages for
Transolution, xlifftool and XML-TMX: https://nekral.homelinux.net/pootle/
(online when I'm not sleeping)
Omegat doesn't need to be installed (java -jar omegat.jar should be
sufficient to test it).

Best Regards,
-- 
Nekral