XliffTasks compatibility to Multilingual App Toolkit

Hi,

i hope this is the right spot to contact, but would also appreciate direction on where to look otherwise.

We are currently migrating our Xamarin Apps to MAUI and facing some issues regarding the localizations. With Xamarin we used the Multilingual App Toolkit along with the Editor, to provide and gather translation for different languages through the xlf files. The build process with MAT will not work anymore as our build pipeline is also changing, and MAT is not working on non-windows build nodes. Therefore we tried to replace the build generation steps with the "XliffTasks" as we found no other options. And this is working in general. But as we would like to stick to the MAT editor for the plain translation process, we discovered some problems regarding the exchange of xlf files.

"XliffTasks" adds empty <note> elements to every <trans-unit> element. The MAT Editor will remove them on save. The "XliffTasks" will add them again on the next clean build, but all entries are marked as state="needs-review-translation".
- The optional <note> elements shouldn't trigger translation changes (or be enforced to exist).
new <trans-unit> elements are added only with the id attribute. The MAT for example evaluates the optional translate attribute (defaults to "no") to un-/lock the element for translation (so every entry would needed to be changed by the user for translation).
- some configuration options to add optional attributes to the <trans-unit> elements would be helpfull, e.g. translate="yes", xml:space="preserve"
new <trans-unit> are written plain to the <body> element. The MAT always places <trans-unit> in a <group> element in the <body> element. Also the Editor can't open xlf files which don't have a <group> element included.
- this is more of an MAT Editor issue, but some configuration options to define a default group where new <trans-unit> are placed into would be helpfull here.
- https://github.com/microsoft/Multilingual-App-Toolkit/issues/29

Thanks in advance for feedback.

dotnet / arcade

XliffTasks compatibility to Multilingual App Toolkit #14544