The Dutch NLnet Foundation, aiming to stimulate open network research and development and more general to promote the exchange of electronic information, has decided to financially support the Lokalize project of KDE.

Previously NLnet, alongside sponsoring of a number KDE projects and activities, helped to develop ODF support in KOffice. This sponsorship is to support another open standard, XLIFF, in Lokalize.

During the KDE 4.3 development cycle, Nick Shaforostoff, the original author and maintainer of Lokalize will work on XLIFF editing support and integrating Translate-Toolkit's odf2xliff (also funded by NLNet) and also other converters to make Lokalize a general user-friendly translation tool for freelance translators.

Nick has already implemented basic open/save functionality as well as displaying and editing in-line mark-up. You can track the progress of the project via Nick's blog (aggregated on PlanetKDE).