XML Internationalization and Localization

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Summary: A truly excellent book
Review: This book was truly a pleasure to read. A good writing style, a lot of information, and a tight editing job that really makes both the messenger and the message look better. What more could a person ask for?

XML is definitely out there, and it seems to be a lot more than just a buzzword. Finally there is a book that makes it seem more accessible to international markets.

Well, not everything was perfect. But it was so much better than some of the other books out there, that it definitely deserves 4/5 stars.

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Summary: Single Most Important Book in the Industry in 5 Years!
Review: This is a brilliantly written and well-illustrated compendium of information on the localization and internationalization of the Extensible Markup Language format that is becoming the standard means to store and exchange data on the web and in large-scale deployments. The book is well structured, going from basic encoding and structural aspects to advanced uses. It also covers practical aspects of authoring and internationalizing data, and then translating it. This book is a MUST for everyone in the Globalization Industry, not just those interested in XML.

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Summary: Well worth the money - essential for Product Globalizers
Review: This is a great book for the 'doers' in the product globalization technology fields. Well worth the money. Extremely credible combination of industry guru Yves Savourel's content with some additional flavoring of content from globalization expert Ultan O'Broin of Oracle Corporation provide a wide-ranging discourse on how to design, develop and build XML content that is multilingual and fully globalized and easily translated. For the first time we see the words "pseudo-translation" mentioned in a book at this level (please take note Nancy Kano et al) as well as the treatment of the localization process as a business activity (and not some kind of warm armpit partnership between developers and translators). Brilliant. I hope the book heralds a new departure in content creation and also attitudes in the internationalization and localization industry - it's badly needed. My only quibble is the lack of CD-ROM with example XML files that we might have used to evaluate our own XML tools and processes with to compare with the books findings.

Rating:
Summary: Great book - sorely needed - just in time
Review: Yves Savourel has a firm grasp of the technical aspects of XML development - completed by a wealt of experience in the product globalization arena. The writing style in XML internationalizaion and Localization is clear and unambiguous - easily understood by the novice and guru alike, and using terms that are familiar to anyone working in the internationalization and localization industries. The book's content is comprehensive with useful and practical examples, directly applicable to the real world. Thorough, interesting examination of one of critical development formats for entrprise, database and internet computing, the book is much needed! I hope there is more to come.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent book on "XML tools for Internationalization"
Review: Yves Savourel's book on XML Internationalization and Localization is an excellent resource and definitely worth reading for anyone working with XML in an international environment.

I found the first part of the book especially helpful, the second part is very focussed on translation processes, assuming that web content internationalization and localization occurs in a similar fashion to software product development, which is not necessarily the case. "XML Tools for Internationalization and Localization" might have been a more appropriate title.

The comparison of translation tools is very long and difficult to read, with unnecessary screenshots showing all samples. A tabular overview on standards compliance and supported features, together with one set of testcases, would be sufficient. The XML database chapter, on the other hand, could be expanded with more information on native XML databases.

Typographical conventions leave room for improvement, including the choice of fonts, indentation in structured example and the overuse of line continuation characters in places where line breaks are not significant.