Translation Markup Language and Universal Translation Memory

Networking 6:30-7:00 PM, and after the talk as time allows.
IMUG map & directions: http://imug.org/google/asilomar.html

Today’s web and mobile app localization industry relies on numerous standards, libraries and file formats to facilitate the exchange between developers and translators. While some formats are somewhat sophisticated, others lack even the most fundamental features, like pluralization and contextualization. And most can’t offer support for more advanced localization features, like language cases.

The most common formats used today include Gettext PO, Android XML, YAML, .Net RESX, iOS Strings. Those standards are typically packaged with popular frameworks and in some cases leave the developer with no choice but to use them. A typical developer today works with many frameworks - for instance a Rails backend app (YAML) with Ember front end (i18n JS) and iOS mobile app (Strings). Since all standards have distinct syntax - in many cases translations cannot be shared across applications.

Translation Markup Language (TML) aims to solve both these problems by introducing a powerful extensible cross-platform syntax that offers support for pluralization, language contextualization, language cases, reusable decorators and much more. TML libraries are available for all major web and mobile platforms. TML allows translators to do in-context translations - where they can translate right from within the apps. TML libraries also eliminate the need for developers to ever deal with the resource files, as all extractions and translation substitution is done realtime and the resource files are only used as a transport between the apps and the Translation Exchange platform.

Translation Exchange stores all translations in Universal Translation Memory (UTM), a graph database which stores all translations with their context, tone, rank and other attributes for accurate matching. This allows translations to be shared across all apps in the Translation Exchange Network. The translation memories of each app are extracted from the UTM graph and are managed by their individual localization teams.

During this presentation we will look at some of the features of TML and how it can be used to quickly translate an app into a number of language using in-context translation tools. We will also look at how the data is stored and shared across applications using UTM.

Michael Berkovich is a co-founder at Translation Exchange (https://translationexchange.com/). Before starting "TrEx", Michael was a lead engineer at Geni, where he built an open-sourced localization platform called tr8n. The platform allowed Geni users to submit, review and validate translations. Geni.com (http://geni.com) was translated to more than 20 languages in less than 3 months. The site is now available in more than 40 languages. Michael helped integrate tr8n at Yammer, Kongregate and other companies around the world. Before Geni and Yammer, Michael was a lead engineer at SOA Software (Akana) where he built core products for managing and monitoring web services.

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