Migrating to XML in a Localization Environment

By Maxwell Hoffmann, Manager of Consulting Solutions, ENLASO Corporation

Sure, they work for now, but are your documentation systems clinging to yesterday's solutions? Perhaps it's time to consider migrating to an XML solution? Conversion of legacy systems to a single source system can result in immediate cost and time-to-market savings of 50%.

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With the need to reduce resources associated with localization of all types of documentation, most global companies are plagued by the ongoing challenges of the great number of data formats, platforms, fonts, and conflicting feature sets of non-English-enabled versions. What's a global company to do? Migrate to XML!

Traditional Documentation Situation
A company with budget and time constraints needs to localize their product's English user manual for seven international markets. They discover that the manual was developed in an application (Quark, PageMaker, FrameMaker etc.) that will require expensive and resource intensive desktop publishing and engineering. Further, the threat of a last-minute update to the product is possible as the company fights to stay ahead of its competition before its massive global launch. To make matters more complicated, the support department requested multiple output formats (ex. PDF, HTML and SGML). What's a company to do?

Migrate to XML!
XML is revolutionizing content management, document exchange protocols, and multilingual communications. XML provides a structured, content-based standard that represents a spectrum of document and data formats. Unlike traditional formats, XML keeps the content of a document separated from presentation information. Text and data are stored between descriptive tags, which can be nested within one another to establish hierarchical relationships.

Translating with XML
The nature of XML is inherently global-ready, as it is one of the only document standards with complete multilingual capabilities, as Unicode is the default code. And because XML is fully portable across platforms and XML-compliant applications, the author of the XML data is not critical as long as data follows the standard and the DTD that governs the XML is valid.

The introduction of XML-based translation tools will significantly automate leveraging and alignment processes, reducing translation costs substantially. When leveraging documents in XML, the engineering of alignment can be minimized greatly because XML tags tell more about the type of content than traditional formatting codes. Further, traditional tools are easily confused when source and target legacy documents do not match closely, requiring the need for engineering.

The use of XML in localization can eliminate the need for independently maintained translation memories. Frequently, translation memories are challenged, if not rendered useless, with the introduction of different tools and proprietary formats. With an XML-based translation system, a company’s collective XML file structure is the translation memory.

XML Automates Publishing
Since XML is content-based, formatting is handled in a final rendering stage, where a script automatically formats text by interpreting the structure of an XML document. The key to this rendering stage is automation. Depending on the sophistication of the rendering script and the degree of structure in the XML, most publishing tasks can occur automatically, with a minimum of human cleanup.

Single-Source Solution
With XML, scripts can be written to render a single XML document to multiple output formats. This opens the door to single-source publishing, where a single XML file can be instantly rendered to the desired publishing formats. In localization projects with multiple target languages, language-specific rendering scripts can adjust formatting attributes for the particulars of each language. For example, the same table in French and Spanish target documents can be adjusted automatically so that column widths are appropriate for the particular language without any human adjustment. Single-source publishing also accommodates inevitable last minute content updates much more efficiently than traditional publishing.

Maxwell Hoffmann – Manager of Consulting Solutions, ENLASO Corporation (translate.com)
A pioneer in the field of multi-channel publishing for localization, Maxwell Hoffmann is ENLASO’s Manager of Consulting Solutions. A 20-year veteran of high volume, scalable publishing, Hoffmann has developed single-source solutions for print and electronic output (including PDF and XML) for over a decade. His previous positions encompass duties as Product Marketing Manager and Director of Worldwide Sales Training for Frame Technology. Hoffmann is experienced with all major publishing hardware platforms and has trained over 1,500 customers. With a BA in graphic design, he gained font and typographic expertise while working at Mergenthaler-Linotype and also mastered Interleaf and Arbortext publishing tools, as well as XML publishing standards.