Translation Related File Formats

These are the different storage formats for translations and files associated with translations that are supported by the toolkit. See also conformance for standards conformance.

Common concerns in handling these files using our base classes for a uniform API are quoting and escaping.

• XLIFF
• Gettext PO

• CSV
• .ini (including Inno Setup .isl dialect)
• Java properties (also Mozilla derived properties files)
• Mozilla DTD
• OpenOffice.org GSI (Also called SDF)
• PHP translation arrays
• Qt Linguist .ts (both 1.0 and 1.1 supported, 1.0 has a converter)
• Symbian localization files
• Windows RC files
• Mac OSX strings files (also used on the iPhone) (from version 1.8)
• Adobe flex files (from version 1.8)
• Haiku catkeys (from version 1.8)

• TMX
• Wordfast: TM
• Trados: .txt TM (from v1.9.0 - read only)

• OmegaT glossary (from v1.5.1)
• Qt Phrase Book
• TBX
• UTX (from v1.9.0)

• HTML
• iCal
• JSON (from v1.9.0)
• OpenDocument - all ODF file types
• Text - plain text with blocks separated by whitespace
• Wiki - dokuwiki and MediaWiki supported
• Subtitles - various formats (v1.4)

• Gettext .mo
• Qt .qm (read-only)

Things that we would like to support but don't currently:

• Wordfast: glossary tab-delimited “source,target,comment” i.e. like OmegaT but unsure if any extension is required.
• Apple:
  • AppleGlot
  • .plist - see 633 and plistlib for Python
• Adobe:
  • FrameMaker's Maker Interchange Format - MIF (See also python-gendoc, and Perl MIF module)
  • FrameMaker's Maker Markup Language (MML)
• Microsoft
  • Word, Excel, etc (probably through usage of OpenOffice.org)
  • OOXML (at least at the text level we don't have to deal with much of the mess inside OOXML). See also: Open XML SDK v1
  • Rich Text Format (RTF) see pyrtf-ng
  • XML Paper Specification
  • .NET Resource files (.resx) - Bug 396
• XML related
  • Generic XML
  • DocBook (can be handled by KDE's xml2pot)
  • SVG
  • Android resource files specifically string resources (more background)
• DITA
• PDF see spec, PDFedit
• LaTeX - see plasTeX, a Python framework for processing LaTeX documents
• unoconv - Python bindings to OpenOffice.org UNO which could allow manipulation of all formats understood by OpenOffice.org.
• Trados:
  • TTX (Reverse Engineered DTD, other discussion)
  • Multiterm XML TSV to MiltiTerm conversion script or XLST
• Tcl: .msg files. Good documentation
• Installers:
  • NSIS installer: Existing C++ implementation
  • WiX - MSI (Microsoft Installer) creator. Localization instructions, more notes on localisation. This is a custom XML format, another one!
• catgets/gencat: precedes gettext, looking in man packages is the best information I could find. Also LSB requires it. There is some info about the source (msgfile) format on GNU website
• Trados:
  • .tmw
  • .txt (You can interchange using TMX) Format explanation and 2 with some examples.
• WML
• GlossML
• Deja Vu External View: Instructions sent to a translator, Description of external view options and process

These formats are either: too difficult to implement, undocumented, can be processed using some intermediate format or used by too few people to justify the effort. Or some combination or these issues.