[xliff] XLIFF inline tags

[David Pooley <DPooley@sdlintl.com>]

As a tools developer, I'm a little concerned over the functionality of the inline tags available in XLIFF. Sleep deprivation (thank you son) means that I may forget later so I thought that I'd raise this now. I apologise that this has come so late in the day but it was only the recent discussion on the <bin-unit> problem that prompted me to re-visit these tags. I accept that this is tool late for V1.1 but perhaps we can discuss this for the next version ...

 

First of all, I'm not clear why <bx/> and <ex/> are required. As far as I can make out, they are functionally equivalent to <bpt></bpt> and <ept></ept> (i.e. empty elements). John may be able to set me straight on this. If this is the case then at least I'll know what to do with them in my parser. However, having extra elements for the sake of it doesn't make my life any easier.

 

Secondly, I don't think that I'm given sufficient freedom of choice for my mark-up style. I believe that <g> and <bpt> are supposed to be functionally equivalent. However, <g> gives me the ability to "clone" whereas <bpt> gives me the option of an "rid" and a "crc". A similar case applies to <x/> and <ph>; I can "clone" an <x/> but <ph> lets me specify a "crc" and an "assoc". In fact, <x/> also has to do the job of <it> but doesn't have the option of a "pos" attribute (it would also need an attribute to indicate what role it's playing; <ph> or <it>).

 

Thirdly, I'd also be interested to hear views on sub-sentence alignment and the role of the "id" and "rid" attributes. Take, for example, the following snippet of HTML and it's translation in to French:

 

<p>The <b>black</b> <i>cat</i></p>

<p>Le <i>chat</i> <b>noir</b></p>

 

When filtered in to XLIFF, we have the following possibilities (depending on mark-up style).

 

<source>The <g id="1" ctype="bold">black</g> <g id="2" ctype="italic">cat</g></source>

 

<source>The <bpt id="1" ctype="bold">&lt;b&gt;</bpt>black<ept id="1">&lt;/b&gt;</ept> <bpt id="2" ctype="italic">&lt;i&gt;</bpt>cat<ept id="2">&lt;/i&gt;</ept></source>

 

Is there than an implicit requirement to match up the formatting in the target or should we be looking to use the "rid" attribute to do this? SDLX traditionally matches up the <g> tags by "id" but, in TMX (the origin of <bpt> et al), there's no requirement to do this and there is available an "x" attribute to achieve this goal.

 

My logic would suggest that the following translations are correct:

 

<target>Le <g id="2" ctype="italic">chat</g> <g id="1" ctype="bold">noir</g></target>

 

<target>Le <bpt id="2" ctype="italic">&lt;i&gt;</bpt>chat<ept id="2">&lt;/i&gt;</ept> <bpt id="1" ctype="bold">&lt;b&gt;</bpt>noir<ept id="1">&lt;/b&gt;</ept></source>

 

However, are there any restrictions in XLIFF to prevent me from having the following as translations? (Note that "id" numbers)

 

<target>Le <g id="1" ctype="italic">chat</g> <g id="2" ctype="bold">noir</g></target>

 

<target>Le <bpt id="1" ctype="italic">&lt;i&gt;</bpt>chat<ept id="1">&lt;/i&gt;</ept> <bpt id="2" ctype="bold">&lt;b&gt;</bpt>noir<ept id="2">&lt;/b&gt;</ept></source>

 

I thought that perhaps this was what the "rid" attribute was for (to match up the formatting between source and target). I'd rather avoid having to deal with the second situation in my parsing, as I then need to work out exactly which source formatting corresponds to which target formatting. In the case above, I could possibly use the "ctype" to match them up but that's not a mandatory attribute so it's not always possible. I also don't relish the prospect of fetching out the content of <bpt> and trying to use that!

 

As I said, I don't expect anything to get resolved for V1.1. However, I'd like to see some clarification of inline mark-up in the next version (V1.2 / V2.0?). The currently available options are adequate for my own filtering (I'll stick to the OpenTag tags that I know and love) but I'd really like to provide an XLIFF editing environment for files that come from other sources and I don't feel that the current specification is helping as much as it could.

 

David Pooley

Software Architect

SDL International

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