Open an SDLXLIFF file online
An SDLXLIFF file — the bilingual working file exported from Trados Studio — is
XLIFF 1.2 with an extra sdl namespace on top,
and that extra markup is where the interesting parts live: confirmation levels,
match percentages, comments, and lock flags. This page opens
the file in the editor running in this tab — the bytes are parsed by a Web Worker
on your own machine, and there is no server to send them to.
On export the original bytes are spliced, not rebuilt, so every attribute you did not touch comes back exactly as it went in. No licence, no account, no install.
The file opens in the editor. Export clean file in the top bar — or Exports → Clean file — writes the .sdlxliff back out.
When you need this
A project manager sends you a single bilingual file from a package you have no licence for. A client asks what a vendor actually delivered, and you want to read the file before answering. You are on a laptop without the desktop tool installed and three segments need fixing before a deadline. In each case the work is small, and standing up a full CAT environment to do it costs more than the job.
It is also the fastest way to read a file you did not create: states, inline tags and notes, without the file being changed by the act of opening it.
Steps
- Open the file. Drop the .sdlxliff file on the zone above, or choose it from disk. It is read and parsed by a worker in this browser tab; there is no upload endpoint to send it to.
- Check the header. The top bar shows the filename, the language pair read from the file, and how many segments are already confirmed. If the language pair is not what you expected, you have the wrong file.
- Edit and confirm. Ctrl+Enter confirms a segment and moves to the next unconfirmed one, Ctrl+Insert copies source to target, Ctrl+, inserts a tag at the caret. Segments locked in the original file stay read-only.
- Run the checks. Choose Run QA checks in the top bar. The QA issues panel groups the results by check; click an issue to jump to its segment.
- Export the file. Choose Export clean file, or Exports then Clean file. You get an .sdlxliff back under the same name, with only the segments you edited changed.
- Hand it back. Put the file back where the project expects it, under its original name, and generate the translated document from the tool that produced the SDLXLIFF.
What to check afterwards
Reopen the exported file in the desktop tool and check three things: confirmation levels read the way you left them, comments are still attached to their segments, and match percentages on untouched segments are unchanged. Locked segments should still be locked.
If you changed nothing, the export is byte-identical to the file you opened, so a
checksum settles it: certutil -hashfile file.sdlxliff SHA256 on Windows, shasum -a 256 elsewhere.
The gotcha
Confirmation is not the XLIFF state
attribute. It lives in <sdl:seg conf="Translated"> inside the unit's <sdl:seg-defs> block,
with values like Draft, Translated, ApprovedTranslation and ApprovedSignOff. Converters
that only write state="translated" produce a file
that opens fine and reports every segment as unconfirmed, which turns into a zero-percent
analysis and a very awkward email. xliff.ai writes conf and leaves percent, origin, struct-match and text-match alone.
The second trap is scope: the SDLXLIFF is not the deliverable. It is the bilingual working file, and the client's Word, HTML or IDML document still has to be generated from it by the tool that created it. Editing here replaces the translation step, not the file-generation step.