Format XML standard pour la traduction multilingue

J’ai été déçu d’une chose en voyant cet exemple, déçu par le fait que la version Anglaise et la version française, résident dans deux fichiers différents. Mais ça ne semble pas toujours être le cas. La page suivante de Wikipédia EN, donne un exemple de traduction bilingue, Japonais/Anglais, dans un seul fichier

Why XLIFF is only bilingual and not multilingual?

XLIFF is bilingual (each translation unit offers a <source> and a <target> elements) because it makes the overall model much more simpler when you consider all the additional features the format provides, such as pre-translation, version tracking, etc.

There are not significant advantages (and actually many drawbacks) in having a file containing all languages together during localization. At some point you will have to split such file into source and one target since it has to be translated by different translators.

There are however ways to have multilingual XLIFF documents, if you really want to:

• Each <file> element can have different source/target pairs.
• The language of the data in the <alt-trans> element can be different from the main source/target languages. This allows you to have proposed translation coming from a different language. For example: French (fr-FR) proposed translations could be offered when translating into French Canadian (fr-CA), and so forth.

Can XLIFF be used as a resource format?

Probably. If the data you need are simple (e.g. identifier/string pairs), XLIFF can probably be used as source format for your application.

However, keep in mind that XLIFF has never been designed for such purpose. Its intent is not to be a common resource format, but a storage format for extracted during the localization process.