round-tripping
Having done so much work for a large client in the travel industry with very (very, very, very) large quantities of translation, round-tripping almost sounds like a holiday. But it is not in the context of translation. It is actually right at the core of translation environment tools (aka CAT or TM). When confronted with a translation in any format, we always look at two items: the content and the file format and the actual formatting of each single word. CAT tools are poised to extract the translatable content, segment it into smaller portions and present everything to the translator. What we take for granted in this process is actually one of the most impressive technical achievements of these tools: to round-trip the content in a way that the translation “fits” the original file format.
Now, we got use to this and take it (as mentioned) for granted. But these days XLIFF has taken round-tripping to new levels. XLIFF still provides support for the same thing: content can go on a round-trip. It “leaves” in the source language, and when it comes back, the target language can be inserted where the source text was. XLIFF is simply the Xml Localisation Interchange File Format. This means that XLIFF communicates all necessary information to the translator, who does what he/she does best (translation that is) and then sends it back. On the trip, there is (almost) no way that harm can be done to the actual source format and this very complicated and cost intensive aspect of the translation process can be handled elsewhere. The cool thing is that today most serious CAT tools support XLIFF and it looks like this is going to change the way translators will work.