In general SDL Passolo is supporting the localization of multilingual XML files quite well. As a pre-requisite the XML structure must comply with some basic rules. These rules were not introduced by the Passolo team or SDL, these basic rules were published by Yves Savourel in his book XML Internationalization and Localization 15 years ago.

Your files doesn’t comply with these basic rules. To make XML files localization friendly you should not use infinite naming schemes for the data elements. Instead you should introduce the XML standard language declaration xml:lang.

With a file structure like

<item id=“123“>

<text xml:lang=”enu”>Coffee</text>

<text xml:lang=”deu”>Kaffee</text>

<text xml:lang=”cht”>咖啡</text>

</item>

it would take minutes to create a proper XML parsing rule in SDL Passolo to support it as a multilingual file.

I know that many XML designers don’t know this book and doesn’t put much effort into the design of localization friendly XML structures. If you can influence the XML design please ask the development team to implement these basic rules.

Sometimes the files are coming from an external customer and the XML structure can’t be changed. In this case you need to think about other (more costly) solutions as the file structure you provided can’t be supported out of the box. You need to perform pre-and post-processing to convert it into the above structure or implement a customized parser.

In general SDL Passolo is supporting the localization of multilingual XML files quite well. As a pre-requisite the XML structure must comply with some basic rules. These rules were not introduced by the Passolo team or SDL, these basic rules were published by Yves Savourel in his book XML Internationalization and Localization 15 years ago.

Your files doesn’t comply with these basic rules. To make XML files localization friendly you should not use infinite naming schemes for the data elements. Instead you should introduce the XML standard language declaration xml:lang.

With a file structure like

<item id=“123“>

<text xml:lang=”enu”>Coffee</text>

<text xml:lang=”deu”>Kaffee</text>

<text xml:lang=”cht”>咖啡</text>

</item>

it would take minutes to create a proper XML parsing rule in SDL Passolo to support it as a multilingual file.

I know that many XML designers don’t know this book and doesn’t put much effort into the design of localization friendly XML structures. If you can influence the XML design please ask the development team to implement these basic rules.

Sometimes the files are coming from an external customer and the XML structure can’t be changed. In this case you need to think about other (more costly) solutions as the file structure you provided can’t be supported out of the box. You need to perform pre-and post-processing to convert it into the above structure or implement a customized parser.