Making XML Document Markups International

In name and in practice, the World-Wide Web (hereafter Web) is used around the world, beyond English-speaking areas. This creates a tremendous need to internationalize standard terminology used in the technologies that make the Web possible. Existing efforts on XML internationalization (i18n) and localization (i10n) have focused on the content of XML documents instead of terms used in markup (annotations) such as elements and attributes. The SGML standard ISO 8879 supports the use of Unicode (ISO 10646) throughout a document, including markups. However, most elements and attributes of XML documents are still defined in English, thereby limiting their use among non-English speakers.
The full paper in the SPE 35(1):1-14 presents an XSLT-based method that can completely localize the markup of XML documents into different natural languages. We also describe how the proposed technique can be applied to translation problems in programming (e.g. C and Java) or documentation (e.g. LaTeX or other formatting languages) so that a program or a document can be converted to and from an XML format.
A shorter paper "Localizing XML documents using XSLT(HTML)" has been previously presented in the Applied Informatics 2003 conference with the following demonstation kit.