The original post is here.
An employee at Adobe suggested that I copy my rant (which I had originally posted on G+, which is where he saw it) onto an post on Adobe's blog, so I did. That post was one of the things that "inspired" my rant in the first place, so it seemed fitting.
Just this last week, a representative from SDL (makers of Trados, the leading translation tool in the industry) posted a reply. It said basically what I expected it might, that a lot of people might not understand the filters well enough, that generic XML filters might not give the segments to the translators in an "optimal way," and that other information relevant to the document (formatting, etc.) might be difficult or impossible to obtain with a generic filter.
They do admit, though, that "a generic filter could have some value where no specific filter exists." And a major producer of translation tools responded to my comment. Which is awesome.
I still think that variations on a zipped XML filter would be valuable. One could create specific filters for Docx, Xlsx, Idml, etc. and translate those files directly in the original format instead of a middle format, which is what virtually every translation tool that isn't a Word macro does. Trados, Wordfast, Lingotek, Idiom WorldServer, OmegaT... All of them convert your original document into some middle format, usually XML-based itself. Why not create a tool that would take out the middle man? It might be something to look into some time in the future, but it might not be enough of a selling point if the other tools' middle formats can be satisfactorily converted back to the original formats. But then I think of those Word files that we translated in class, not too complex, whose formatting got mangled by the various translation tools that we subjected them to...
Ok. This rant is over. The moral of this post: People listen to you in unexpected ways sometimes.
