translation tech standards and tools

[Gregg Reynolds <gar at arabink dot com>]

Hi,

FYI, a little company in Singapore (with whom I have no connection, 
except I've used their tools for a few months) has some new translation 
tools that seem to work pretty well with Arabic.  Not open source, alas, 
but quite inexpensive, cross-platform, with very good standards support. 
 They seem to be completely devoted to the big three, TMX 
(http://www.lisa.org/tmx/), XLIFF 
(http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=xliff), and 
TBX (http://www.lisa.org/tbx/).

If you're involved in translating manuals or similar documents, these 
standards offer major advantages over .po and other methods.  See 
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-localis/

Those of you thinking about creating a terminology database might want 
to take a long hard look at the TBX standard as the long-term solution 
and at Heartsome's TBX editor (the only one on the market??) as a useful 
tool until somebody comes along and implements an open-source TBX editor.

Arabeyes.org might want to consider hosting an open TMX/TBX combination 
for translators.

-gregg