XLIFF guides
Reference material for people who open bilingual files for a living. Each article covers one thing properly — the structures, the attribute names, and the failure modes you meet in real projects — rather than summarising a specification you can read yourself.
Start with opening and editing a file safely if XLIFF is new to you, then translating one from start to finish, and, if the job came from a translation management system, exporting it for offline work and importing it back. The reference articles after them cover the two standards, inline tags, placeholders and segment states. The rest are practical: plural forms, pseudo-translation before a release, machine translation that keeps its tags, Excel round trips, converting a file, word counts for a quote, fixing tag errors and reviewing a translation.
- How to open and edit an XLIFF file without a CAT tool What is inside an .xlf file, what you can safely change in a text editor and what breaks, and how to edit one in a browser with its tags and statuses intact.
- How to translate an XLIFF file, step by step The whole job, from the file you receive to the file you send back: what to check first, memory and glossary, translating with the tags intact, QA, statuses and export. In the browser, with nothing uploaded.
- XLIFF from a translation management system: export, translate offline, import back How the cloud translation systems export a job as XLIFF for offline work, what each one puts in the file and refuses on the way back in, and how to translate the file in your browser and upload it without errors.
- XLIFF 1.2 vs XLIFF 2.0 What actually changed between the two XLIFF standards, why 1.2 still carries most CAT tool interchange, what a migration costs you, and what 2.1 added.
- Inline tags explained Every inline element in XLIFF 1.2 and 2.0, what each one represents, how pairs are joined, why an editor must treat tags as atomic, and what tag soup costs you in TM leverage.
- Placeholder syntaxes by framework Which frameworks emit which placeholder syntax, why QA has to treat every one of them as an untouchable token, and the specific ways they get corrupted in translation.
- Segment states across CAT tools How XLIFF 1.2, XLIFF 2.0, SDLXLIFF and MQXLIFF each record segment status, which distinctions survive a handoff between tools and which quietly do not.
- XLIFF plurals: how each format stores them XLIFF 1.2 and 2.0 have no plural element. How gettext, Angular ICU messages and Xcode exports carry plural forms through XLIFF anyway, what XLIFF 2.2 adds, and what a translator has to check.
- What is pseudo-translation (pseudo-localization)? Pseudo-translation, or pseudo-localization, swaps your text for an accented, padded copy to catch hard-coded strings, truncation and concatenation before any real translation. What the Android and Windows pseudo-locales do, and how to pseudo-translate a file.
- Machine-translating an XLIFF file without breaking its tags Why machine translation damages inline tags and placeholders, three ways to protect them, and how xliff.ai's AI translation, on your computer or with your own key, keeps tags, writes Draft and refuses any result that loses one.
- XLIFF to Excel and back, without breaking the file What Excel does to translation text and IDs on the way in, the cell and line limits that matter, and a review round trip that changes only the segments a reviewer actually touched.
- Converting an XLIFF file: to Word, Excel, TMX or another version Why an XLIFF file turns back into a Word document only in the tool that made it, which conversions are safe (a spreadsheet for review, TMX for a memory) and which lose information, and what xliff.ai converts in the browser.
- Word count and match analysis: why two tools rarely agree How translation tools count words, why the same file gets different totals in different tools, what repetitions, fuzzy bands and weighted counts mean on a quote, and how to count an XLIFF file in the browser.
- How to fix tag errors in a translated XLIFF file What missing, extra, reordered and unpaired tags mean, where they come from, why a file with one can fail on import, and how to find and fix each one without touching the markup.
- How to review a translation in an XLIFF file A review workflow for bilingual files: what to check, using the MQM error categories, how to let automatic checks find the mechanical errors first, how to see exactly what changed between versions, and how to get a client's review back from Excel.
Teaching translation technology? The free teacher kit has six exercises in XLIFF, SDLXLIFF and MQXLIFF files, each with an answer key, for a lab where nothing can be installed.
Nothing here needs an account or an upload. If you want to try any of it against a real file, open the editor — the file stays in your browser.