Re: po vs. xliff

[Tim Foster <Tim Foster Sun COM>]

hi there,

On Thu, 2003-10-02 at 12:51, Elros Cyriatan wrote:
> > we're going back on the software
> > message file side, and fixing that too.
> 
> Will the work on the software message side become public once it's ready?
> And if so, what types of adaptions are these, and what kind of time frame
> should I think about (weeks, months, years?)?

Yes. We're looking at converters from po and other message formats to
xliff. I'm hoping that they'll be available in some number of months :
I've got javacc-based parsers for these formats already from previous
work - I need to do a little work to support the additional directives
in GNU po format (over and above Solaris gettext files) but as I say,
once they're in xliff, the rest of our tools would also be able to
process these files.

> > It's design was to make the localisation process easier by getting
> > placing the burden of understanding source file formats, such as .po,
> > .java resource bundles, sgml, xml onto the tools developer and letting
> > the translator concentrate on the text to be translated.
> 
> Ok, that clears things up, thanks. That would make it much easier to
> (possibly) gradually convert from PO to XLIFF as source format.

Right - of course, you mean "translation format" not source format : for
us, the source text is still .po and it still gets compiled to mo
eventually, just that for the localisation process, and to allow us to
use the same tools on every file type, we at Sun would be converting
them to xliff first.

> > Absolutely, you can take some consolation from the fact that we're
> > working with it at the moment, and will probably be processing po
> > files before we can get parts of our solution released.
> 
> Certainly. What do you mean with the last sentence? Do you mean that
> PO files are used as a temporary intermediate format and that they
> will disappear once the tools are ready?

Nono, remember that xliff is a container format : po files are still
important, just that translators don't see them anyore, only developers
or release engineers would *have* to worry about po files. Translators
could choose to translate either the raw po files, or the same files
converted to xliff format. If I was translating stuff myself, I'd choose
xliff, for reasons I've already mentioned.

My point was, that by the time we get our tools to the stage that we can
release them, the po to xliff stuff will almost certainly be ready
(because other folks in Sun are looking for this support from us too, so
dealing with .po files is already on our priority list)


	cheers,
			tim