RE: [xliff-comment] Join/Split strings

["Yves Savourel" <ysavourel@translate.com>]

Hi Ricardo,

> I saw that HeartSome XLiff Editor does not have support 
> for Joining and spliting segments as usual in other 
> translation tools.
> I would like to know if this is a tool or a XLiff 
> structure limitation.

Mostly it's not a limitation of the XLIFF structure, but the
answer is more complex than a simple 'no'.

XLIFF is just a format. The tools do whatever it wants with
the XLIFF data. For example you could take the exact same
file you have in your XLIFF Editor, open it in a tools like
Trados TagEditor, or SDLX, or Atril's DV, and the content of
each <trans-unit> would be segmented by sentence.

XLIFF does not attache any definition to the content of a
<trans-unit> (or more exactly to the content of the <source>
element in the <trans-unit>: "The <source> element is used
to delimit a unit of text that could be a paragraph, a
title, a menu item, a caption, etc."

It means the tools break down the extracted text however
they want: some (most of them) may choose to break by
sentence, other by logical units (paragraph, string, etc.)

All this said, One should be very careful when joing two
<trans-unit> elements as the tools that will merge back the
text into its original format will need (most likely) the
same number of entries as it extracted.

Most tools extract "paragraph"-type units, so it's rare (but
possible) that you would need to join two <trans-unit>
elements for translation. The XLIFF Segmentation sub-TC is
working some solutions for allowing a common way of allowing
this type of joining.

But most of the time, the segments will be within the
<trans-unit>, and most tools do allow you to "re-break" the
segments in such case.

I hope it helps.
-yves



-----Original Message-----
From: Ricardo Junior [mailto:ricardo.junior@gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, December 27, 2004 1:05 PM
To: xliff-comment@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [xliff-comment] Join/Split strings

Hi all,

   I saw that HeartSome XLiff Editor does not have support
for Joining and spliting segments as usual in other
translation tools.

   I would like to know if this is a tool or a XLiff
structure limitation.

Thanks in advance,
Ricardo Jr.