[xliff-tools] XLIFF representation

[Rodolfo M. Raya]

On Tue, 2005-04-26 at 10:51 -0600, Yves Savourel wrote:

Hi Yves,


> I was looking at the XLIFF PO Guide Draft 2 (http://xliff-
> tools.freedesktop.org/wiki/Projects_2fXliffPoGuideDraft2) which is, I
> think, the latest draft I can access, and I had a question:


That's current draft. Asgeir Frimannsson is reformatting the text, but I
don't expect any radical change.


> I noticed that <trans-unit> have an id but no resname. It seems that
> it would be reasonnable for a software file format to have unique ID,
> and 'msgid' seems to be capable of doing this. I realize that msgid is
> really used for the source text, and that leads to make it in pratice
> not really usable for resname. Many localization tools rely on ID to
> do things like leveraging, updates, or alignment. It would be nice to
> have a solution for resname. (One cannot use id as it's just a
> sequential number).


The attribute "resname" is defined as: Resource name or identifier of a
item. Entries do not have unique names or IDs in a PO file. There is
nothing you can use to identify each segment in the source format. So,
the values that could be used to fill the "resname" attribute would be
random values, not something extracted from the original document.
Instead of forcing the PO to XLIFF converter to add a random value to
that attribute, the guide leaves this task to the tools used to
translate the XLIFF document. 


> I guess my question goes a little further and touched on the usage of
> msgid itself. Wouldn't be more efficent from a localization viewpoint
> to recommend using unique IDs there instead of the source string? That
> would also follow the concept of treating the source language as "just
> another language".


I think that this issue should be raised to the creators and maintainers
of the PO format. The XLIFF PO Guide aims to develop a best-practise
guide for representing the various features of the PO file format in
XLIFF. It does not attempt to change the PO format.

Personally, I think that PO format should be replaced with something
else and XLIFF would be a good option, but I doubt this can happen due
to the overwhelming number of projects that already use PO files.

Regards,
Rodolfo
-- 
Rodolfo M. Raya <rodolfo at heartsome.net>
Heartsome Holdings Pte Ltd
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