Re: XLIFF tools
On Tue, Dec 27, 2005 at 11:25:17AM +0900, JC Helary wrote:
>
> Generally speaking, my earlier comments on the .po format are limited
> by my lack of familiarity with the format. I apologise for any
> misunderstanding born from my mails.
>
> I think though that it is clear that .po as well as .xliff are both
> _localisation_ oriented formats while .xliff also provides native
> support for documentation translation. In short, it is _conceptually_
> easier to fully localise an application (GUI/Docs in various formats)
> by using an exclusively .xliff based process than by using an
> exclusively .po based one.
I think this is a false statement. There are tools to handle documentation
as po files, and I believe kde is using this successfully for all their
documentation, and has done so for some years.
> As far as translation management is concerned though, it seems to me
> that translation variants are better handled by xliff and this
> specific item should greatly enhance the translation process in
> Debian if properly implemented:
Why do you think that? I believe po files has good support for management.
And this has been one of the strong points vs. other formats, viz.
java-bundles. Where is xliff strong in management? Having more than
one version in one file could be seen as confusing. Java-bundles
also has more in their format, all kinds of things actually, but that
does not make that format better for translation.
> The fact that xliff interacts fully with other translation standards
> (tbx for glossaries, srx for segmentation, tmx for tm exchange)
> greatly enhances the translator's experience and allows a Debian
> localiser to easily leverage her/his work with external sources that
> would require quite a lot of fiddling right now, while keeping the
> output result consistent with the Debian po based localisation
> framework.
I don't know much on xliff, but the gettext system has standard programs
for translation memory and compendia - which seems to be similar to
the functionality you claim that only xliff has. Could you explain the
functionality of each of these components more?
I think it is a good idea to try out some other functionality and
this could be tried out given that there exists conversion tools
between po and xliff formats.
One question: can you have other character sets than Unicode in xliff?
Keld
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