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. 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. The very existence of a standard however does not mean it’s the panacea for every problem it may be loosely related to. It’s against this background I was prompted to write about this topic after reading this article questionning whether some companies were preventing translators from improving their lives. The article makes a number of claims which I think might be a little misguided in my opinion… in fact this is what it says:
XLIFF 2.0 is a “new” bilingual format for translation that attempts to do a handful important things for translators.
- Improve the standard so that different translation tools makers, like SDL, don’t “need” to create their own proprietary versions that are not compatible with other tools
- Creating true interoperability among tools, so translators can work in the tool of their choice, and end-customers can have flexibility about who they work with too
- Allow businesses to embed more information in the files, like TM matches glossaries, or annotations, further enhancing interoperability
I say “new” because XLIFF 2.0 has been around for years now. 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. It’s one of those things where commerce gets in the way of sanity.
We all know, I think, that translating a PDF should be the last resort. PDF stands for Portable Document Format and the reason they have this name is because they were intended for sharing with users on any platform irrespective of whether they owned the software used to create the original file or not. Used to share so they could be read. They were not intended to be editable, in fact the format is also used to make sure that the version you are reading can’t be edited. So how did we go from this original idea to so many translators having to find ways to translate them?
A strange title, and a stranger image with a pair of zebras and a road, but in keeping with the