RE: [xliff] What is XLIFF for?

["Peter Reynolds" <p.reynolds@maart.pl>]

Title: RE: [xliff] What is XLIFF for?

Hi Bryan,

At one stage Novell were using XLIFF as the format for developing their applications. My understanding is that they had got very excited about XLIFF and were seeing all sorts of possibilities which turned out to be unpractical in the long run.

When the Data Definitions group was set up, there was a very strong feeling that the work which Yves and the ILE folk had done with OpenTag was something which should not be allowed to die and would prove an excellent starting point for a Localisation Interchange File Format.

I am looking forward to hearing your presentation.

Thanks,

Peter.


-----Original Message-----
From: Yves Savourel [mailto:ysavourel@translate.com]
Sent: Wed 2010-09-15 23:48
To: xliff@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [xliff] What is XLIFF for?

Hi Bryan,

> What are some of the other scenarios?
> Forgive me if I'm showing my naiveté.

Here are my 2 cents:

3 - For transporting between different tools data that are in the process of being localized/translated. Some processes involve tools from different origins and XLIFF is used as the medium to transfer the data from one to the other. In that scenario, the documents from the customer to the LSP may have been XLIFF or something else, and the translated documents the LSP send back to the customer may or may not be XLIFF. In short: XLIFF is used internally in the process.

4.a - Used as a native resource formats. Although it was never meant for this, some are using it as the main storage format for their localizable resources. Those resources may get compiled or not. Some do this with Flash, ICU as also a toolset to use XLIFF like this.

4.b - Some XLIFF elements are used within other XML-based resource formats. A good example of this is Android resource files, I see more and more of those resources using the XLIFF namespace, like here: http://code.google.com/p/apps-for-android/source/browse/trunk/DivideAndConquer/res/values/strings.xml?r=134

5 - XLIFF used as TM repositories. I think there is a presentation on that at the Symposium.


One note on your #2: I'm not sure any tool uses XLIFF as a storage format *natively*. Rodolfo can correct me, but for example in Swordfish, I think, the project's data are saved in a database. Trados has its own format as well. All those tools can certainly read XLIFF seamlessly, and they can produce XLIFF as well, but that is not their *native* format.

To me a format is 'native' when I can modify the file of a project outside the tool and see the modifications once the same project is open, without doing import/update or any command like that. For example, TMX is used natively by OmegaT: the data of the project are saved in TMX, I can modify those TMX files outside OmegaT and the change are just there when I open the project.

Cheers,
-yves



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