xml export to html: a wolf in sheep’s clothing?
I maintain that one of the most under-rated advantages of CAT tools (aka Translation Environment tools) is that they take care of the source text format. My feeling is that the spread of XML will give increasing urgency to this point. The reason for this is that XML has not only lots of options to store data, there are also heaps of options when it comes to publishing this data. One of which is html.
The trouble is that as a translator you always have the round-tripping challenge to tackle. I’ve talked about this before - but the basic story here is that really you might have to translate that particular html file, but you are expected to return an XML file. The secret is the mark-up. XML is a way to label data and has per se no structural or presentational function. While html has mainly structural functions in terms of the presentation of content. But obviously an html file can include “invisible” xml mark-up that does not affect the presentation of the document at all. In other words: xml code can be exported and displayed as html page, but the crucial information when it comes to translation is hidden from view.
We had a fairly interesting example of this, where the html source looked something like this:
<gp id=”KnGY/=”>Which of the following age groups do you fall into?</gp>
<gp id=”eJwtx8sJg==”>Under 20</gp>
<gp id=”eJwtxz”>20-24</gp>
<gp id=”eJwtx==”>25-29</gp>
In such a case if you were to use a WYSIWYG editor to translate the html file, you would of course lose the <gp> tag information and thus the translation would not be suited to be imported back into the system the client works with. Even if this may not be a typical example of an XML file, it still shows the importance of working with a CAT tool that is able to see beyond the presentation of a file.