Customer Reviews

XML Internationalization and Localization

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Yves Savourel's book on XML Internationalization and Localization is an excellent resource and definitely worth reading for anyone working with XML in an international environment.

I found the first part of the book especially helpful, the second part is very focussed on translation processes, assuming that web content internationalization and localization occurs in a similar fashion to software product development, which is not necessarily the case. "XML Tools for Internationalization and Localization" might have been a more appropriate title.

The comparison of translation tools is very long and difficult to read, with unnecessary screenshots showing all samples. A tabular overview on standards compliance and supported features, together with one set of testcases, would be sufficient. The XML database chapter, on the other hand, could be expanded with more information on native XML databases.

Typographical conventions leave room for improvement, including the choice of fonts, indentation in structured example and the overuse of line continuation characters in places where line breaks are not significant.

This is a brilliantly written and well-illustrated compendium of information on the localization and internationalization of the Extensible Markup Language format that is becoming the standard means to store and exchange data on the web and in large-scale deployments. The book is well structured, going from basic encoding and structural aspects to advanced uses. It also covers practical aspects of authoring and internationalizing data, and then translating it. This book is a MUST for everyone in the Globalization Industry, not just those interested in XML.

This book was truly a pleasure to read. A good writing style, a lot of information, and a tight editing job that really makes both the messenger and the message look better. What more could a person ask for?

XML is definitely out there, and it seems to be a lot more than just a buzzword. Finally there is a book that makes it seem more accessible to international markets.

Well, not everything was perfect. But it was so much better than some of the other books out there, that it definitely deserves 4/5 stars.

Yves Savourel has a firm grasp of the technical aspects of XML development - completed by a wealt of experience in the product globalization arena. The writing style in XML internationalizaion and Localization is clear and unambiguous - easily understood by the novice and guru alike, and using terms that are familiar to anyone working in the internationalization and localization industries. The book's content is comprehensive with useful and practical examples, directly applicable to the real world. Thorough, interesting examination of one of critical development formats for entrprise, database and internet computing, the book is much needed! I hope there is more to come.

This is a great book for the 'doers' in the product globalization technology fields. Well worth the money. Extremely credible combination of industry guru Yves Savourel's content with some additional flavoring of content from globalization expert Ultan O'Broin of Oracle Corporation provide a wide-ranging discourse on how to design, develop and build XML content that is multilingual and fully globalized and easily translated. For the first time we see the words "pseudo-translation" mentioned in a book at this level (please take note Nancy Kano et al) as well as the treatment of the localization process as a business activity (and not some kind of warm armpit partnership between developers and translators). Brilliant. I hope the book heralds a new departure in content creation and also attitudes in the internationalization and localization industry - it's badly needed. My only quibble is the lack of CD-ROM with example XML files that we might have used to evaluate our own XML tools and processes with to compare with the books findings.

As more and more software products are being localized, the advantages that XML offers for internationalization are being exploited. If you're involved in globalizing documentation in any way, this book will help you understand what is required for internationalizing XML documents and for localizing XML data efficiently.

The first part of the book is titled "Enabling XML Material", but it's really an introduction to the facilities that XML provides to overcome the problems of internationalization (developing a product so that it works with data in different languages) and localization (translating and adapting a product to different cultural conventions). For example, the internationalization process must cope with different rules for sorting in various alphabets, and different representation of times and dates across the world.

Chapters in part 1 discuss how XML represents characters in different natural languages, how XML identifies the language of document content, and how well the various rendering technologies such as CSS and XSLT cope with language issues such as writing direction and sorting rules.

Part 2 deals with the techniques for ensuring that XML documents are optimized for localization. The first couple of chapters describe cost-saving techniques for creating XML documents that are more easily localized and that allow better reusability. The part ends with a chapter about the use of XML with databases. It's interesting if you need to know about how to extract text from a database for translation, or how to publish XML content to a database.

Part 3 deals with the techniques and tools for localizing XML documents. Some of the tools discussed are not specific to XML, so much of the material is applicable to localization in general. There are chapters that discus online translation systems and tools particularly in terms of how well they support XML. There is also material about the OpenTag and XML Localisation Interchange File Format (XLIFF) formats for extracting localizable text from non-XML file formats into a common format for translation. Also covered is Translation Memory eXchange (TMX), an XML format for exchanging translation memory-exported files between translation tools.

There is a useful glossary and a number of appendixes listing language codes, and OpenTag and TMX tags.

To sum up, the book is well written and ideas are communicated clearly. The author is very experienced in his field and has covered the relevant subject matter very comprehensively. However, a book covering a fast-changing subject area such as XML is bound to get a little out-of-date. (For example, there is no coverage of XML Schema).

The book concentrates on XML-related matters but it also covers general problems of internationalization. As such, the book is useful for technical communicators who produce XML content to be localized, as well as to localization professionals.