Re: po vs. xliff

[Elros Cyriatan <cyriatan fastmail fm>]

On Thu, 02 Oct 2003 13:45:12 +0100
Tim Foster <Tim.Foster@Sun.COM> wrote:

> 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.

Nice.

> > > 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.

Yes, with source I meant what translators would see as source (hiding the
fact that it's actually PO or some other format).

> > > 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?
[snip]
> 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)

Ah, ok.

When everything is ready, I'd like to give it a try!

-- 
 
  Elros Cyriatan
  89D0A011957D96020E7D1D16B37D496E440D660A