Making XML document markup international

  • Authors:

  • Yijun Yu;Jianguo Lu;John Mylopoulos;Weiwei Sun;Jing-Hao Xue;Erik H. D'Hollander

  • Affiliations:

  • Computer Science Department, University of Toronto, 40 St. George Street, Toronto, Canada M5S 2E4;University of Windsor, Windsor, Canada N9B 3P4;Computer Science Department, University of Toronto, 40 St. George Street, Toronto, Canada M5S 2E4;Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, People's Republic of China;University of Bern, 3010 Bern, Switzerland;University of Ghent, 9000 Ghent, Belgium

  • Venue:
  • Software—Practice & Experience
  • Year:
  • 2005

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

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 the 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. This paper 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.