I’m not writing as an expert on XLIFF (because I’m not), but I am passionate about translation and the technology we use, so I’m just delivering my view on the usefulness of XLIFF 2.0. It’s one of those things where commerce gets in the way of sanity.ĭoes XLIFF attempt to do anything for translators specifically? I have a character flaw forcing me to respond to things like this, and so I did, but as the commenting was tricky and the discussion unwieldy I thought I’d be able to address this better in my own article.
Unfortunately, adoption of the XLIFF 2.0 standard has been slow, due to tools makers and other players deciding that interoperability is not in their interest. I say “new” because XLIFF 2.0 has been around for years now.
I’m in awe of the knowledge and effort the technical standard committees display in delivering the comprehensive documentation they do, working hard to deliver a solution to meet the needs of as many groups as possible.
If you think that this trick is too difficult for you, I recommend using Virtaal which is free and very easy to use,Īnd it will enable you to open and translate XLIFF files directly, without preparation.In the last year or so many articles have been written about XLIFF 2.0 explaining what’s so great about it, so I’m not going to write another one of those. However, the above-mentioned trick can be useful for
Note: Wordfast Pro does NOT officially support translation of XLIFF files. To learn more about generating *.properties file, please refer to the article about Translation of XML Files. Those *.properties files might need customization based on the structure of files. If you rather need to translate a source only "standard" XLF, you can use this (*.properties) file downloadable here. General conversion rules (*.properties) file valid for most bilingual "standard" XLF files can be downloaded here. XLF example file (generated by iLocalize) can be downloaded here.