[xliff-tools] C-format annotations

[Tim Foster]

On Wed, 2005-02-16 at 15:06, Bruno Haible wrote:
> 1.4.1.4.2. C-format
> 
> <x> seems to be a more suitable placeholder than <it>: it does not require
> a pos="open" attribute.

We're using <it..> but I guess that's an impl issue. In general XLIFF seems
to be split between using the "TMX" style markers (it, ept, bpt) and the
others (ph, x, etc.) which I think came from OpenTag, but I'm not sure...

We went for it, ept and bpt as it was the same style as we were using for
TMX already.

> Unsolved question: How does this deal with reordering (in C, the POSIX
> "%2$d" syntax)?

I don't understand ?

> Also it makes it impossible to replace %d with %Id - an option needed by Farsi
> translators.

Not so, we allow people to change the contents of sections marked by inline
markers such as it, ept and bpt, they're there so that translation tools
can differentiate between formatting and "normal" translatable text, an
example being that the strings :

"This is <a href="http://bla.foo.com/something">text</a> so there."
and
"This is text so there."

have very similar (exactly the same?) translations - but it'd be nice to
give hints to a translation tool how to weight the different portions of
text when doing fuzzy lookup. By marking the formatting sections in <ept>
and <bpt> tags, this is easy. Maybe it's not such a big deal for PO files,
but useful nonetheless if you want to write tools down the line to make
sure that translators have got the same number of formatting elements
in source and target elements, and suchlike.

(and 'cause it's xliff, those tools only need to be written once ! :-)

	cheers,
			tim

ps. forgot to mention way back, we also do java .properties files,
mozilla-style .dtd file and XResources (if anyone's interested)

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