XML Editor for translations

February 4, 2007 6:38 PM

Looking for a free/cheap/convenient (in that order - will pay if it makes life simple) XML editor. [mi]

I need to have text within some XML documents translated into Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages.

I'd like to 'mark up/colourise' the text in a way that makes it easier for the translators to identify and translate inline.

I want to minimise double handling/parsing of XML into other formats as much as possible.

*The text is unfortunately part of the XML elements - so using the MS Word reader doesn't show the text separately to the tags.

posted by strawberryviagra to computers & internet (13 comments total)

Notepad++
posted by sanko at 6:50 PM on February 4, 2007

oXygen?
posted by tmcw at 6:55 PM on February 4, 2007

jEdit
posted by mmascolino at 8:10 PM on February 4, 2007

Perhaps XML Notepad 2007 will be helpful.
posted by nj_subgenius at 8:24 PM on February 4, 2007

You don't mention platform, so I assume it's Windows. Eclipse also has XML editing capabilities, using any of these plugins, some of which are free and some of which probably don't suck.
posted by dammitjim at 9:42 PM on February 4, 2007

I might be over-complicating things, but it sounds like you might want the ability to edit in a styled view as well as the raw XML. For cheap WYSIWYG XML editors, I like Syntext Serna. It's easy to integrate with if you need to do that, not too expensive for personal/home use ($89), and you can edit the markup directly as well as via the formatted view. If you don't mind seeing nothing but markup, I'll Nth the oXygen recommendation. If you really, absolutely have to go free, try Butterfly XML
posted by hackwolf at 10:49 PM on February 4, 2007

emacs is ok, for pretty much any text based format including international character sets, once you work out the different input methods and go through the emacs tutorial when you first start using it (about 1/2 hour).

The other advantage with emacs is that once you get over the initial learning hump (rather than curve), you've got it for life as it's the Free Software Foundation's flagship product.

(happy emacs user for ~ 12 years now :-) )
posted by singingfish at 11:20 PM on February 4, 2007

If you are hiring pros, then colourising the text is a waste of time. Professional translators use software like Trados when translating text. They do not typically do translations inline. Therefore, the cheapest and most convenient solution is to do nothing and let the translators do their jobs.
posted by crazycanuck at 6:58 AM on February 5, 2007

I've written two very large XML-based applications with jEdit, and I've never found anything that works as well.
posted by boo_radley at 10:14 AM on February 5, 2007

CrazyCanuck: I've worked with translators doing this kind of thing before - most are able to handle inline XML translations, however, due to the structure in this particular experiment, there are 2 instances of each piece of text - they only need translate one of them - it's complicated, and I seek to make it easier for them.

I've had a look at a few of these - I'll spend the day checking which is the most effective/easiest to use. Thanks everyone for your suggestions (I'll update the thread later today).
posted by strawberryviagra at 2:28 PM on February 5, 2007

Having asked a similar question about XML editors recently, I like XML BluePrint which isn't free but is pretty full-featured for the price.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 3:24 PM on February 5, 2007

We ended up just re-saving them as RTF files, marking up the text, translating, then saving them as XML - seems to be working OK.

I now have a bunch of options though, for doing future XML work - so thanks again mates!
posted by strawberryviagra at 10:38 PM on February 5, 2007

Let me clarify that - we saved the translated RTFs out of Word Pad as .txt files.
posted by strawberryviagra at 11:08 PM on February 5, 2007