XLIFF

XLIFF (XML Localisation Interchange File Format) is a language derived from XML. It was developed to solve problems associated with multilingual translation management.

The first version was released in May 2001 by a group of high-tech companies, including IBM, Novell, Oracle and Sun Microsystems.

In December 2001, XLIFF became part of OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), and in October 2003 the official specification for the 1.1 version was released.

The concept behind this format is very simple:

From the original document are extracted, on the one hand, the content to be translated (the translation units); on the other, all the elements that cannot be translated (the skeleton). When the translation is completed, the two elements are re-combined to form the final document.The main advantage of the XLIFF format lies in this complete separation of content and form, which considerably simplifies the process of translating a document.This is how the process works without XLIFF being used:

 

In this case, the translation company has to convert the various formats it receives into a format compatible with the computer assisted translation system it is using.

The main disadvantages of this approach are that:

  • Most of the formats currently used for document processing do not separate the content from the form (the layout);
  • The translation company has to process the form of the documents concerned (pagination, graphics);
  • This increases the complexity of the operation, which inevitably results in the customer being charged more for the service.

This is how the process works with XLIFF:

In this case, the customer himself uses tools which happily support the XLIFF format, or tools which can produce a document in XLIFF format, before the document is sent to the translation supplier.

There are many advantages in doing things this way:

  • Complete separation of form from content;
  • Optimisation of management procedures (each party gets on with his or her own job!)
  • Lower costs.

Here is an example of an XLIFF file:

<xliff version='1.1' xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:xliff:document:1.1">
<file original="file1.prop" source-language="en-US" datatype="javapropertyresourcebundle">
<header>
 <skl><external-file href="file1.prop"/></skl>
</header>
<body>
 <trans-unit id="1" resname="id1">
 <source xml:lang="en-US">Text to translate 1</source>
 </trans-unit>
 <trans-unit id="2" resname="id2">
 <source xml:lang="en-US">Text to translate 2 </source>
 </trans-unit>
 </body>
</file>

From this example, we see that the basic structure of an XLIFF file consists of:

  • The XML declaration (composed of 2 version elements and the related namespace (in green)
  • The characteristics of the processed file (name, source language and type) (in red)
  • A header section (in brown)
  • Within the header section, the name and path of the structure file (the skeleton) is indicated  between the tags <skel> (in blue)
  • A body section (in brown)
  • Within the body section is an initial trans-unit element identifying the segments of text in need of translation.
  • Note the id attribute, which unambiguously identifies every segment that has to be translated.
  • Finally, there is the text itself, between the <source> tags (in blue)

Services

  • Advice on the choice of a computer assisted translation system based on XLIFF;
  • Design, deployment and technical support.