Re: [xliff] Uniqueness of language pair

["Dr. David Filip" <David.Filip@ul.ie>]

Thanks Rodolfo, for opening this.

I think that it makes perfect sense to set language pair uniqueness constraint at the file level.

I was talking to Wordbee in summer trying to recruit them for the TC. Anyway, Wordbee (as our customer) would represent a business need for bulk exchange of multilingual collections. I assume that a collection of different files with various source and target languages would do the trick. Nevertheless, I suspect that Stephan (Wordbee CTO and cowner) would be even more radical than that, and that he would simply want to allow systematically multilingual use of multiple targets.

I quote Wordbee position to impartially illustrate an existing business need. I personally would use multilingual formats only with utmost caution, as they pose obvious business process issues, e.g. problematic merging to central data store.

If we allowed some controlled sort of multilingualism (multi- in the sense of more than bi-) [if I remember correctly, Andrzej had a good study of why multilingual formats are to be discouraged in translation automation], we would need to explicitly say in processing requirements, that this format MUST NOT be used in and for translation editors. We would need to specify canonical transforms to facilitate canonical behavior of translation editors, that should be bilingual. The multilingual bulk exchange construct should be restricted to CMS<->TMS and TMS<->TMS bulk exchange.

[I am aware that alt-trans target is sometimes being used multilngually, I am however not sure what are the support levels for this in tools.. IMHO this is a seprate discussion..]

Rgds

dF

Dr. David Filip

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On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 11:31, Rodolfo M. Raya <rmraya@maxprograms.com> wrote:

Hi,

 

In an XLIFF 1.2 document you may have multiple <file> elements and they could have different source/target languages. In theory, that would allow someone to create an XLIFF document with many copies of the same <file> element, each having a different target language. In practice, that would be a bad idea as tools that work with XLIFF usually expect bilingual documents.

 

It might be interesting for XLIFF 2.0 to set source and target language in the <xliff> element and let all <file> children inherit the declared language pair.

 

Opinions?

 

Regards,

Rodolfo

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Rodolfo M. Raya       rmraya@maxprograms.com
Maxprograms       http://www.maxprograms.com