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

["Rodolfo M. Raya" <rmraya maxprograms com>]

On Wed, 2004-12-01 at 23:59 +1000, Asgeir Frimannsson wrote:

Hi,

> 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. 

This is crucial. Deviations from XLIFF standard are devil.

> 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)

I can donate the source code of Heartsome's PO filter. If interested,
contact me off-list please.

> 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 looked at your page and found that the proposed mapping is very
dangerous. You use a custom namespace, valid according to XLIFF rules
but a huge problem because foreign namespaces in an XLIFF file are
intended to be tool specific. If you use your own namespace, you will
have to write your own tool to handle it.

> 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. 

XLIFF standard defines file format quite well. If you have a valid XLIFf
file without custom tagging, any XLIFF-enabled editor should be able to
translate it.

I examined XLIFF files generated by several commercial/free tools and
95% of them can be edited with any XLIFF-enabled translation program.
The key is to restrict the selection of elements/attributes used in the
file to a simple subset of XLIFF 1.0 and XLIFF 1.1 . 

Keep me posted about your plans for a XLIFF related project. I would
gladly help if I can.

Regards,
Rodolfo
-- 
Rodolfo M. Raya <rmraya maxprograms com>
Maxprograms