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
• 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)
• Windows RC files (from v1.2)

• TMX
• Wordfast: TM

• Qt Phrase Book (from v1.2)
• TBX

• HTML
• iCal (from v1.2)
• Text - plain text with blocks separated by whitespace
• Wiki - dokuwiki and MediaWiki supported

• Gettext .mo
• Qt .qm (read-only)

• OpenDocument Format: ODT, ODS and ODP (We have an old sxw converter)
• WML

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

• Wordfast: glossary
• Apple:
  • AppleGlot
  • MacOS .strings file localization - Bug 371 relates to this.
• 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
  • XML Paper Specification
  • .NET Resource files (.resx) - Bug 396
• XML related
  • Generic XML
  • DocBook (can be handled by KDE's xml2pot)
  • SVG
• DITA
• PDF (spec)
• 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)
• Android resource files specifically string resources
• Subtitling
  • Both .sub and .srt are the main formats supported by YouTube
  • SubViewer .sub - the format is outline on the youtube wupport page above.
  • SubRip .srt
  • Gaupol an PyGTK based subtitling tool looks like a good option to get format readers.
• Tcl: .msg files. Good documentation

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.

• Trados: .tmw, Trados .txt (We are unable to find good documentation for these formats, you can interchange using TMX)