XML for translation less efficient than Word?

I can only second Ian and Matt.

I guess it also depends very much on who you talk to at SDL. There are a lot of people at SDL who understand XML very well and will tell you the exact contrary of what your contact told you.

Also, it depends often on if you are talking to a "project manager" or a "language engineer". The language engineers will tell you as well that XML is the best for translation. And: I have never met a senior project manager working for an LSP, who told me that Word is his preferred choice. In the contrary: I have never met a senior pm with experience who does not hate Word files in translation processes …

Of course, not all XML is good XML. I have also seen stuff like this arriving at an LSP for translation:

<root>
     <element1 content="translate me" />
     <element2 translate="translate me" />
     <element3 iforgotwhichatrributeihaddefined="translate me" />
     <element4 maybethisone="translate me" />
</root>

Such XML is, of course, no fun for an LSP as it makes a lot of work to create a custom filter for that.

But if you have a proper XML structure based on a DTD or Schema or a standard compliant XML like DITA, for which tools like SDL Trados Studio have predefined filters, then XML is definitively the way to go. And it's definitively the most stable process compared to any other file format.

Sean,

I find that to be a very strange and hard to understand response. I've worked with a major US based translation agency on and off for the last ten years. I implemented and XML workflow for a major client where the master documents are XML and the authoring and publishing is using structured FrameMaker.

The benefits of this system are that the XML handling translation memory system was set up and barely changed for ten years. In that time we moved from FrameMaker 8 to FrameMaker 12. The change of FM version had no impact on the translation workflow because the XML output was identical from all FM versions.

I believe that the issue may be with perceived knowledge of XML when compared to Word or FrameMaker native files. XML can be scary to the new user...

However that's just hiding the problem as we all know that Word documents can be of wildly differing quality even if they look good on the surface. The same can also be true to a lesser extent with unstructured FrameMaker.

A lot of my time as a document architect and XML developer is spent creating systems that can handle the randomness of unstructured content. Perhaps SDL is translating the content but retaining the 'free-form' inventiveness of the source documents...

Ian