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Tool Kit * It's a Whole New World Out There—XLIFF Finally Finds the Support It Deserves
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About the author: Jost Zetzsche is an ATA-certified English-to-German translator and a localization and translation consultant. He co-founded International Writers' Group on the Oregon coast and sends out a free, biweekly technical newsletter for translators (see www.internationalwriters.com/toolkit).
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We've just figured out what the TMX standard is (for those who haven't,
it's the exchange of translation memories), and now we need to learn
another of these gruesome abbreviations for a translation-specific
interchange format? Well, yes, but XLIFF (pronounced ex-liff) may be
something that you'll want to get used to because it has finally made
its move from a nice, well-meant theory into the real world.
So, what is it?
This is what the Sun website
says: "XLIFF is an XML-based format that enables translators to
concentrate on the text to be translated. Likewise, since it's a
standard, manipulating XLIFF files makes localization engineering
easier: once you have converters written for your source file formats,
you can simply write new tools to deal with XLIFF and not worry about
the original file format. It also supports a full localization process
by providing tags and attributes for review comments, the translation
status of individual strings, and metrics such as word counts of the
source sentences."
What that means is that instead of exchanging data after the
translation (through TMX or the termbase standard TBX), XLIFF allows
for the exchange of data during the translation process itself. Once my
HTML, RTF, or FrameMaker file has been converted into the XLIFF format,
I can use any tool that supports that format to translate it, without
needing the original application. This applies to any computer-assisted
translation tool as well as any original authoring tool (such as
FrameMaker or others). What this in turn may mean is that eventually we
all will work almost exclusively in XLIFF files and don't have to worry
about having ever expanding tool sets.
So while "XLIFF" may not be pleasing to the ear, it should be music to
the mind of the translator and really anyone who works in the
translation industry!
The problem with XLIFF is that even though the author of the quote says
rather naively that "you can simply write new tools to deal with
XLIFF," the industry has not exactly been forthcoming with commercially
available new tools. The only commercial tools that have supported
XLIFF for some time now have been the localization tools Alchemy
Catalyst (www.alchemysoftware.ie)
and Passolo (www.passolo.com),
which I will write more about in the next edition of the newsletter.
Traditional translation memory tools have (willfully?) ignored it—that
is, until last week, when SDLX finally announced a new filter for XLIFF
that can be freely used by all owners of the latest version of SDLX.
Accompanying that announcement, they have also released an interesting
article on XLIFF that you can find at tinyurl.com/3jba2.
All this said, there is one product that has gone beyond any other in
its support of XLIFF (and TMX and—as the first tool vendor in the
market—TBX), and that is Heartsome (www.heartsome.net), a tool that
I'm increasingly impressed with.
First of all, Heartsome runs on Mac, Linux, and Windows! Do you want me
to say that again? Yes, it's actually made to run on all of these
operating systems.
Second, Heartsome does not just support the translation of XLIFF files
in a translation memory environment. It takes a number of formats
(including RTF, FrameMaker, HTML, OpenOffice, and a variety of software
development formats), converts them to XLIFF, provides for their
translation within that format, and then converts them back into their
original format.
The translation is done in large text boxes for the individual strings,
with the option of having a comprehensive context view. The tagging
system (the system by which codes within sentences are identified) is
reminiscent of Star Transit, where tags are encoded in a numbered
format. Because it's Unicode-based, all computer-based languages are
supported.
I have noticed a few minor bugs in several test runs (for instance, the
common iso-code de-de for Standard German was not automatically
recognized and had to be added manually), and I missed having a
separate terminology database. Otherwise, though, I sure liked what I
saw, especially considering the Heartsome XLIFF Translation Editor's
whopping price of $88 and the fact that it's shockingly easy to learn.
Heartsome has now also packaged its variety of products (one for XLIFF,
one for TMX, and one for the termbase exchange format TBX) into one
product suite. This makes sense because all of these products work in
relation with each other, and it can't help but aid users'
understanding of what the company and its products are about.
© International Writers' Group. Excerpt from the Tool Kit
Newsletter, a biweekly newsletter for people in the translation
industry who want to get more out of their computers. For more
information see www.internationalwriters.com/toolkit
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