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copied!<p>I'm about to decide how to handle internationalisation of an XML-based format for UI description.</p> <p>The format typically looks something like this:</p> <pre><code>... <devif> <screen id="scr1" title="Settings for this and that"> <header text="Climate readings"/> <rd setp="123" text="Air temperature" unit="°C"/> <rd setp="234" text="Humidity" unit="%RH"/> <rd setp="345" text="CO2" unit="ppm"/> <header text="Settings"/> <wr setp="567" text="Air temperature demand" unit="°C"/> </screen> ... </devif> </code></pre> <p>Each file contains lots of screens and can be up to some 10.000 lines, and we have a dozen of these files in our application.</p> <p>I can still change the format to best suit our needs. So how would you go about translating this?</p> <p>I've been thinking about some possible ways to handle this:</p> <ul> <li>A separate file for each language containing the english text and translated text</li> <li>Using an ID for each tag and use a separate file with translated text for each id</li> <li>Placing all translations in the same file</li> </ul> <p>The first solution has the problem where the english text might be translated into different messages depending on context.</p> <p>The second solution makes the source file less readable (although not by much), and it does not handle translation of attributes easily.</p> <p>The third solution would make the file very large and cumbersome to work with once the file has been translated into some 5-6 languages.</p>

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