Availability of XLIFF tools

All,

I hope everyone is enjoying the month of August.

Ektron’s content management system (CMS400) has the ability to generate XLIFF documents of the content to be translated. Some of our customers have tried to open the XLIFF documents in an XLIFF editor out of curiosity. They wish to verify that the XLIFF document is OK before sending it out to a translator. We’ve run into a couple of issues.

First, some of our customers have stated that their translation provider is unfamiliar with XLIFF.

Second, some of the XLIFF tools our customers have tried fail to open the XLIFF documents. I believe they have searched the web for XLIFF tools and downloaded them for trial. One such tool is Sun’s Translation Editor.

Third, Ektron is producing XLIFF 1.1, which understandably is causing problems with older XLIFF tools. However, even when converting to XLIFF 1.0 some of the tools fail. Trados and Heartsome are two that are OK with XLIFF 1.0. Ektron can produce XLIFF 1.0 easy enough, so this is the least of the problems.

Questions:

1. Does anyone know of translation providers that can accept XLIFF documents (either 1.0 or 1.1) for translation and interpret them as XLIFF and not some generic XML document?

2. Which tools accepts XLIFF documents, either version 1.0 or 1.1? I know there are some, but would like to hear opinions and which are suitable for someone to download and try out even though they are not a professional translator.

3. Any tools that support XLIFF 1.1 yet? I would like to do some compatibility checking with the XLIFF documents Ektron’s CMS produces.

Thank you very much for your consideration. I especially look forward to hearing from the tool developers on the committee.

Regards,

Doug Domeny

Ektron, Inc.

+1 603 594-0249 x212

http://www.ektron.com

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