Re: Sun Translation tool (Was: Re: Heartsome XLIFF Translation Editor for document translation?)

[Asgeir Frimannsson <asgeirf redhat com>]

On Tuesday 30 November 2004 23:46, Simos Xenitellis wrote:
> Two good news for (XLIFF-based) translation tools within a week. That's
> great.

Having read Tim's blog for a while, I'm looking forward to trying out the SUN 
tools :) 

> Will this tool support a translation memory?
> As open-source there will be a lot of things one can experiment on, like
> Web-based translation, adapting existing tools (KBabel, poEdit,
> gtranslator) to the translation memory and so on...

I think as the XLIFF standard is maturing, and more tools become available, 
it's important for open source projects as well as tool creators to agree on 
standards for representing formats such as PO in XLIFF. 

We're about to launch a project (hopefully on freedesktop.org [1,2]) that aims 
to accomplish the following:
+ develop XLIFF filters for common open source file formats (e.g.
Gettext PO, Docbook)
+ Implement and promote XLIFF support in open source localization tools
+ Implement tools to support XLIFF-based localization in open source
development.
+ Promote and work for standard XLIFF representation guides for common open 
source file formats to ensure interoperability between translation tools.

I have allready started to map out a possible mapping of PO to XLIFF [3], but 
this needs review and I'm now looking closer at how other tools handles this 
file format.

I think it's really exciting that SUN is releasing their tools as open source, 
and the Lite edition of Heartsome is also a good editor (esp. for docbook). 
Hopefully we can cooperate so that when we eventually 'replace' the PO based 
localization processes in larger projects such as Gnome and KDE, translators 
can use their editor of choice, and not have to stick with one editor because 
of lack of standards based xliff representations. 

cheers,
asgeir

[1] http://freedesktop.org/pipermail/xdg/2004-November/005425.html
[2] http://freedesktop.org/pipermail/xdg/2004-November/005448.html
[3] http://people.redhat.com/asgeirf/po-xliff-guide-en/