ITS and PO

ITS Tool loads ITS definitions from multiple sources and applies them to the source document. ITS rules are loaded from the following locations:

These are applied in the given order, and later rules take precedence over earlier rules. Furthermore, many ITS data categories can be specified explicitly using ITS attributes on elements. These always take precedence over information provided by rules.

ITS Tool applies all matching rules, so mixed-vocabulary documents can be handled without any special treatment. For example, if you mix TTML into a Mallard document, ITS Tool will apply the Mallard rules and the TTML rules.

ITS Tool uses its:translate to decide which elements to translate. By default, all elements are translatable. It then breaks up all translatable content into translation units and creates a PO message for each translation unit. An element is a potential translation unit if its:withinText is not set to "yes" for that element. An element that contains only other translation units, however, is not marked for translation. For example, if each HTML li element is a translation unit, ITS Tool will not output a message for the containing ul element.

Attributes are not translatable by default. Attributes on inline elements, however, will appear as part of the message in the PO file. Any attributes that have been explicitly set to be translatable and are not on an inline element will produce a PO file message.

Inline elements that are not translation units are output as-is in the PO file for translation. For example, given the following XML:

<p><em>This</em> is a <link href='...'>link</link></p>

The following message would be created:

msgid "<em>This</em> is a <link href='...'>link</link>"

If a translation unit contains another translation unit, ITS Tool will put a special XML marker in the string for the containing element. Translators must keep this marker, although they may move it around. For example, given the following XML:

<p>Embedded <p>paragraph</p></p>

The following messages would be created:

msgid "Embedded <_:p-1>"
msgid "paragraph"

This uses the special _ namespace prefix, which ITS Tool maps to a special URI internally. Because of the way ITS Tool handles XML markers, source documents cannot use the _ prefix, because it would conflict with ITS Tool. This is a known limitation.

If a translation unit element has a localization note from its:locNote or similar, it will be output as a comment for the PO message. You can specify locations for localization notes in embedded rules, or simply use the its:locNote attribute on any element to provide a comment for translators.