Case Study - XLIFF

While English is the most common language used on the Internet, it's not necessarily a language your site visitors will have nor is it necessarily the language they will use if given the choice. Sometimes a site just has to be translated to communicate effectively with its audience. Animalcarpet CMS contains all the tools you need to publish and run your site in multiple languages.

Animalcarpet CMS supports multilingual publishing in two ways:

1. Content language negotiation
2. XLIFF Translation Management

By content language negotiation we mean the automatic selection of the most appropriate language and, if necessary, changing the content direction (LTR or RTL) in which to display a translated site, a manual override of this mechanism and the fallback to a standard administrative language in cases where a translation is not available - all of which Animalcarpet handles seemlessly.

Translation management, which concerns us here, is a series of procedures for capturing translation content, preparing it to send to a translation bureau and rebuilding site templates to use this translation. Animalcarpet automates much of this process.

XLIFF is the international standard which specifies a format for the interchange of language files (XML Localisation Interchange File Format). XLIFF is now widely supported by translation editor and translator memory software (eg Trados, SDL, Heartsome, Transolution).

The translation management process follows similar paths for both static and resource content within the site. Static content consists of standard template text and on-screen prompts, resource content is all the content you put within the CMS. The translation management process runs as follows:

Template import

You decide which system and page layout templates you wish to translate. You could decide to translate just the publicly accessible pages or you could include the entire CMS if you wished. Template import accomplishes 3 tasks. First, it parses translateable segments from the selected templates; second, it generates a translation memory record for the segments; third, it generates a skeleton template which references the translation memory records.

Translation Export

This process pulls segments from the translation memory in the selected language and generates the XLIFF file to be sent to a translation bureau.

Translation Import

The reverse of the above, translated content is imported to the translation memory.

Build Templares

This process takes matches the imported translations with the skelton templates generated at stage one in this process and saves the translated templated.