Localisation standards and metadata

Abstract

In this paper we describe a localisation process and focus on localisation standards. Localisation standards provide a common framework for localisers, including authors, translators, engineers, and publishers. Standards with rich semantic metadata generally facilitate, accelerate, and improve the localisation process. We focus particularly on the XML Localisation Interchange File Format (XLIFF), and present our experiment and results. An html file after converted into XLIFF, travels through different commercial localisation tools, and as a result, data as well as metadata are stripped away. Interoperability between file formats and application is a key issue for localisation and thus we stress how this can be achieved. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.