Best practices for translating XML documents?

Question

What are best practices for translating XML documents with MT Hub?

And how can I export the translated document to validate the output markup?

Right now (translating the documents as plain text), I'm getting:

- spaces inserted into tags (<em> > < em >)

- significant reordering of tags vs text

- tag names are getting translated

Examples follow (enu > ptb):

<pair name="position" type="integer">1</pair>            < nome par = "cargo" type = "inteiro" > 1 < / par >

<li>Go to the <em>Payment</em> section of your <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/secure/settings" target="_blank">Settings</a> page.</li>     

< li > vá até a seção de < em > < /em > do pagamento da sua < a href = "https://www.linkedin.com/secure/settings" target = blank"> página de configurações de </a >. </li >

<li>Click <em>Manage Billing</em> Info in the upper right corner.</li>      

Clique em < li > < em > Gerenciar cobrança < /em > informações no canto superior direito canto. </li >

<li>Click the <em>Edit</em> link and make your updates.</li>         

Clique no link de < em > Editar < /em > de < li > e faça suas atualizações. </li >

Answer 1

- Transform your XML document to XHTML, using an XSL transform. Choose the appropriate HTML elements for your untranslatable elements. Say <code> or <script> for code. Consider which elements are sentence internal and which ones are sentence ending. Use the appropriate HTML tags. Example: <title> is sentence ending, <a> is sentence internal. Look at your HTML document in a browser after the transform: if it doesn't look right, it won't translate right. Avoid at all cost to introduce sentence breaks where they don't belong, or glue words into sentences, where they shouldn't, say in a table.

- Make sure the resulting document is not longer than 10000 characters. If it is, split into smaller, but complete elements.

- Translate with content-type="text/html".

- Transform (XSLT) back to your original XML schema.

Content-type text/html is designed to preserve HTML formatting and nesting. text/plain will not do that. However, you are pretty much forced into text/plain if you need to translate incomplete XML elements.

Let us know how it goes,
Chris Wendt
Microsoft Translator

Answer 2

Thanks once again, Chris!

: )

Best,

Mike

Answer 3

Thanks. That said, we should not be messing with the individual tags even in plain text. Let me check....

Answer 4

Made an edit to my above answer. Important to consider the sentence breaking vs sentence internal nature of your XML elements.

Chris Wendt
Microsoft Translator