Re: [xliff] XLIFF 2.0 + ICU messages in Angular

["Yoshito Umaoka" <yoshito_umaoka@us.ibm.com>]

Hi Rodolfo,

> It is interesting to notice
how Angular mixes XLIFF 2.0 with ICU 
> Message Format for handling plurals and alternates. It places raw
> ICU notation in <source>, something that requires additional
> processing before translation.
> 
> I've got a sample file with XLIFF 2.0 that has some validation 
> issues. It might be interesting to contact the i18n group at Angular
> and work with them on XLIFF 2.0 support.

The goal of Unicode Message Format
Working Group (https://github.com/unicode-org/message-format-wg)
is standardizing message format pattern
and behavior including plural.
They started with ICU message format
as the base.

David is participating the working
group, and as far as I know, one of
his main interest is XLIFF representation
for message format patterns.
He may have some better insights
for plural message pattern issue.


I'm also struggling the plural format
handling in our private translation
service in IBM. Some teams started
using ICU style plural message
format (through formatJS, Angular,
etc.) and some other teams started
using gettext plural. The gettext
plural is a bit difficult to handle,
because it require to produce different
numbers of segments. So our
internal code maps gettext plural
messages into ICU style plural pattern.
Of course, it ended up the raw pattern
is passed through XLIFF and
it's really error prone. We need
extra tooling for translation workbench
to detect and handle the pattern.


-Yoshito