XML/HTML markup text - nightmare with translators [closed]

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All we know that in Android internationalization can be done using XML'ed resources, which are supposed to be translated by translators. So I have done - hired several translators and send them resources with explanations what to translate and so on. In the end I've got bunch of files saved in different formats/encodings. Some of them sent using Excel, some in DOC, others MS-formatted XML's (nightmare) most sophisticated ones in Trados - list is endless.

Now the question is: how do you guys/girls used to handle translators? What kind 开发者_运维百科of tools/approaches you're using? Please share with your personal experience or solutions.

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Generally, it depends how bug your company is. If you have tons of translations, the best way is to probably centralize your efforts by hiring professional translation company which will care about providing your resources in desired format as well as handling individual translators. This cost more and sometimes result in a delay but in the end will save you a bit on fixing format issues.

Several MT/TM systems will allow you to process XML files as their input/output format (sometimes these files need to be annotated) but you actually cannot force your translators to use them. Unless you are really big, that is. But in such case, you could create your own TM and force translators to translate strings directly using some kind of web interface...

For small companies, there is a bit of a problem... You might want to write some kind of transformation tool that will take XML file as an input and transform it into key=value pairs (similar to Java properties). This is something that most translators will get right (in the end this is just plain text). The only thing you need to ensure, is that they use UTF-8.
BTW. Make sure that Excel is not in use (you need to force them to avoid this thing). It tends to modify text on its own in totally unpredictable way (I am speaking from experience, but I am not allowed to give you really painful examples).

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Translator hell was solved by building a custom web-app that ensured that XML-challenged translators didn't do anything funny - and also built & commited the finished translations to our DCVS in the correct place.

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I would not really recommend building your own tools like Jens did. There are good Translation tools out there that can handle XML and HTML perfectly.
There are even free open source tools such as OmegaT (Simple) and GlobalSight (Complete TMS).
We are using SDL Trados, which costs around 2000 EUR (The version you would need).

As for Pawel: You don't have to be a big company to use a professional translation agency. We (Supertext) can handle almost all filetypes nativly and a translation starts at 60 EUR.