[xliff-tools] xml to xliff

[Tim Foster]

Hi cobaco,

On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 11:32, cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis) wrote:
> On Monday 04 April 2005 09:59, Tim Foster wrote:
> > a segment/msgid out of each paragraph, vs. ours
> > that create a segment/msgid our of every sentence.

> hm, I'm not at all sure that's a good idea:
> the smaller the granularity of the to-be-translated bits, the harder 
> non-literal translation becomes, and especially for documents that can make 
> a large difference in the quality of the translation.

Define "quality" (only joking!)

 - but seriously, we've been using sentence-level segmentation at Sun 
for all of our docs material for the past 3 years (with our internal 
tools, no idea what the translation vendors we were using before were using
wrt. paragraph vs. sentence segmentation) and have found that it's
really not a problem. Linguistic reviewers have been generally happy
with the quality of Sun documentation.

Now, I suspect that part of this could be due to the excellent
technical writers we have and some style-checking tools which are used
in the authoring process to catch sentence-structures that may be
difficult to translate.

Along with that, since the translators are always shown sentences in
their correct context wrt. other sentences in the paragraph, and can choose
multiple different translations for the same sentence (based on the book
name, product name, part number and other attributes) this seems to work
okay. Of course, only allowing one possible translation per source sentence
would result in a very poor quality translation : we don't do that.


I'm not a translator or a linguist, so I can't argue the finer points of
this, except to say that we haven't found it to be a limiting factor at all
and customers haven't been complaining about our translation quality.

(docs.sun.com I think has some translated books, if you want to check them
out )


	cheers,
			tim
-- 
Tim Foster - Tools Engineer, Software Globalisation
http://sunweb.ireland/~timf http://blogs.sun.com/timf
http://www.netsoc.ucd.ie/~timf