[xliff-tools] Comments about XLIFF and the Mapping Guide

[Tim Foster]

Hi Bruno,

Woah, loads of comments there - thanks! I've been pretty inactive
on this list so far, but I'll try to comment on your thoughts where I
can. I've been a part of a fairly comprehensive XLIFF 1.0 roll-out
here at Sun (more later) and have written filters for a bunch of formats
so I've got some experience that might be worth sharing... (ymmv)

On Wed, 2005-02-16 at 14:58, Bruno Haible wrote:
> The XLIFF format, with all its specific elements, is obviously meant
> for professional translators and for workflows inside companies.
> The PO format, on the other hand, was designed for a simple workflow
> consisting of developer and translator only. (This is most visible from
> the simple "fuzzy" flag.) This is entirely sufficient for 95% of the
> open-source projects.

I guess the things we were seeing with po format, was that it was
pretty unsuitable for large-scale documentation translation : for 
software, it's great, but starts to creak a bit when you try to use
it for purposes for which it's not intended. Getting to use the same
tools for both software and documentation has a bunch of benefits
- easier translation process (I hope) and more potential for 
consistency between docs and software translations.

> So a seamless integration of the XLIFF world with the PO world is desirable.

Yes indeed ! Rock on !

> I don't expect XLIFF based open-source translation editors in the next 3
> years

I beg to differ, we're on the way to releasing our translation tools. It
has been a *very* long road (I started talking about this back in 
October 2003 - and we're still not there yet, but are making progress)

We've got a reasonable (if internally slightly messy) editor and a bunch
of filters for po, msg, java, html, Docbook sgml, a generic XML filter
and, just recently I've got sxi, sxw (possibly sxc - haven't tested it)
working too. At this stage, we've got approval within Sun to release 
the tools as open source and and are jumping through various legal
hoops at the moment to get it finalised.

> OK, now some comments on specific topics of the Mapping Guide.

I'll try to get to these today. Most of the comments I've seen on this
list to date are absolutely bang on - I agree with them (which is mostly
why I haven't commented : along the lines of "yep, those guys 'get it' -
I've nothing to add"..

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