[Kbabel] Installation problems.

[Martin Wunderlich]

Dear all,

You might remember my recent message to the list about installing KBabel. I
was testing the program for a comparative review of XLIFF tools to be
published in MultiLingual Computing. Since KBabel is open-source and there
is no "official" support per se, I am turning to this list for a review of
the test results. The text (see below) hasn't been through editing, yet, so
it's not in the final stage. I'd be thankful, if you could have a look at
the text and let me know, if there are any factual errors.
Thank you very much in advance.

Best regards,

Martin

1.1.1Introduction to testing method
The first step for testing the tools was to download a trial version (or the
full version in the case of the open source tools) and install it. For the
actual testing I used the four example files provided in the FAQ section of
the OASIS technical committee
(www.oasis-open.org/committees/xliff/faq.php#Examples) and a fifth test file
of my own making. I constructed the latter to include elements such as
notes, phases, alt-trans, maxwidth, translate=no, overlapping codes etc. In
order to ensure the validity of this constructed XLIFF file, I checked it
against the XLIFF core schema and it was also reviewed by two experts. The
test file is available for review from my website mentioned below.
For each of these five files, I would open it in the respective tool, if
possible translate and save the translated version. Afterwards I compared
source and target file to assess what exactly had been changed. I would then
send a message to the technical support with the issues I noted, to test the
responsiveness. Finally, I wrote up the test results and sent it to the
developer for review and comment.
The quality of translation memory matching and other general functions, such
as word count, were beyond the scope of this test.
The test platform was a PC with Pentium 4, with 2.80 GHz and 512 MB of RAM,
running Windows XP Professional, Version 2002 with Service Pack 2. KBabel
was tested on the same PC, running Klax KDE 3.4.2. LocFactory, the only
dedicated Apple Macintosh program, was tested on a Mac Mini with 1.42 GHz
and 256 MB of RAM, running Mac OS X 10.3.9.

1.1.3 Open Source tools
1.1.3.1 KBabel
KBabel is traditionally used as an editor for PO/POT files in open-source
localisation. As a recent development, it also has some limited support for
XLIFF files, but still uses PO as the internal format. In order to be able
to open XLIFF files in KBabel, they must have the extension “*.xliff”
instead of the recommended one (xlf). The filename is displayed as context.
Hotkeys that are marked by an ampersand (“&”) are highlighted in purple. Due
to the PO format the source is referred to as “msgid” and the target text as
“msgstr”. Tags are editable, but damaged tags are recognized by the program.
The special attributes for maximum length and for untranslatable text are
not taken into account. Notes and alt-trans elements are not displayed and
language settings in the XLIFF file are ignored. In order to export the
files a simple “Save (as)” operation is needed. Inspecting the created files
after export I noted that in one file inline tags were missing. There was no
alert for this. In another instance (example file two) a source element was
deleted.