Localizing XML Documents through XSLT

Existing efforts on XML internationalization and localization have been focusing on the contents of XML documents instead of on the meta presentations such as tags and attributes. Although XML standard allows the use of unicode throughout a document including the meta level presentations, most tags and attributes of XML documents are still defined in English, which makes it difficult for native people to use. This paper presents a pure XSLT stylesheet to completely translate and localize XML documents into different natural languages. Furthermore, we also describe how this technique can be applied to translation problems in programming (e.g. C and Java) or documentation (e.g. LaTeX) languages when the program or the document can be converted to and from XML documents.