ABSTRACT
Formats based on the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) have been used for many years in the translation industry, mainly due to the fact that translation tools have had to rely on standard file formats, either to communicate with each other (interoperability) or to offer offline capability to their users (portability). While proprietary formats had been used extensively by specific tools in the 1990s, the advent of open-source tools and the need to respond to users’ feedback (e.g., individual translators as well as corporate translation buyers wanting to avoid vendor lock-in) prompted translation software publishers to add support for XML-based serialization. For this reason, associations such as the now defunct Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA) and committees from larger bodies such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have worked together to define specifications that would take into account multiple user requirements so that common file formats could be used effectively as standards by a range of translation and localization stakeholders. This chapter presents and reviews the most common XML-based formats that are currently in use by various translation technologies and also offer some insight into alternative serialization formats.
