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.