Anna Filina

Most of the Web applications that I build are multilingual. Since I use the symfony framework often, I rely on the XLIFF standard.

The error

I used to ask my clients to send me a Word document with the translated text. This is the format that they are most comfortable with. An error occurred recently when I copied the text directly from the document to an XLIFF file. For some reason, I could only see the original, English values.

The cause and solution

I would have probably not found the error had I not validated the XML translation file. It gave me a parsing error right in the middle of various strings. They looked fine until I turned on the special characters. Apparently, some special, invisible characters generated a parsing error and broke my application. I sanitized my strings and voilà!

Good practices

Since that incident, I always turn on the special characters in my text editor so that I may pick up any glitches earlier. Also, I no longer ask clients to supply a Word document, but rather a plain text document created with Notepad. To some more technical clients, I even supply the XML with empty <target> tags that they may fill in. That makes less work for me, gives satisfaction to the clients, because they feel empowered, and prevents any parsing errors.