The WebTranslateIt Blog

i18n news and Product Updates about WebTranslateIt

Additional validations when updating YAML files

By Edouard on March 22, 2023

We’ve released an updating to our YAML file handler. When updating a YAML file, the YAML file handler now checks if the YAML file has the same flavour than the existing file. For instance, if you uploaded a classic YAML file and then update it with a Hugo YAML file, you will get an error message and the file won’t be imported.

In case of using a classic YAML file, the system now also checks if the language root corresponds to the file language. For instance, updating an English file with a file using the fr: language root will raise an error explaining the file uploaded is not correct and the file won’t be imported.

What’s new in WebTranslateIt — An October and November recap

By Edouard on November 15, 2022

Hi! I hope you’re having a productive week so far. We’ve been shipping several important updates to WebTranslateIt in the past month. We focussed our attention to code refactoring, improvements to existing features and performance improvements.

We have also released a new category on our blog: The Changelog, where you can see the nitty gritty details about the updates that we make. You can subscribe through the changelog’s atom feed. You can also read the changelog on the dashboard when you’re signed in. It’s a quick and easy way to keep you informed about our latest changes.

Here’s what has changed, by order of importance.

Faster Translation Suggestions

We’ve released an update to the Translation Suggestions system to make them load much faster. They are so fast actually, that we’ve simplified and removed all the loading system that used to work via background jobs. Enjoy a much better user experience when using translation suggestions.

More information: Faster Translation Suggestions

Faster File Updates

We released another round of improvements to our file generation system to make them much faster.

More information: Faster File Updates

Updated our YAML handler

Our YAML files are now generated with a new handler using libyaml. The file output will be different. Here is an example of the differences between our current YAMLer and the new YAMLer.

More information: Updated our YAML handler

Update to the word and character count system using Unicode’s text segmentation standard

This is a very deep change on how words and characters are counted in WebTranslateIt. The new system is more accurate, especially when counting words or characters in CJK language.

You can read more information:
- in our documentation about word counting
- or in the changelog entry.

Translation suggestions system improved

We improved the translation suggestions system for projects using Gettext PO files. Due to the nature of PO files, the source text is often blank and is populated by the key name, and this wasn’t picked up by the suggestions system. We updated our translation memory so that it also uses the text from the key names.

More information: Translation suggestions system improved

API Authentication Update

We’ve refactored how the API Authentication system works internally. The project and organization API keys are now prefixed with proj_readwrite and proj_readonly, for example. There is no need to update your integration.

More information: API Authentication Update

Project image charts updated

We replaced the charts system using the long deprecated Google Image Charts with one provided by quickcharts.io.

More information: Translation Charts Update

Removed low-priority import mode

It used to be possible to push a language file and set the import as a low priority. This was a nice thing to do in the early ages of WebTranslateIt when importing many files used to clog our import queue, but it doesn’t matter anymore so we removed that option and deprecated the command options on the wti client.

More information: https://webtranslateit.com/blog/posts/366-removed-low-priority-file-import-mode

web_translate_it rubygem v2.7.0 released

By Edouard on October 25, 2022

We have released a new version of the web_translate_it gem, the open-source synchronization Command Line Interface tool for Web Translate It.

This new version brings a few improvements:

wti synchronization tool


Install or Upgrade

To install web_translate_it, please refer to the gem documentation.

As usual, upgrade web_translate_it to its latest version by typing in a terminal: gem install web_translate_it.

Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn & Facebook for instant updates.

What’s new in WebTranslateIt? A 2022 Recap

By Edouard on October 11, 2022

We’ve been busy working on the app. Here’s an update of what we’ve been up to.

A large infrastructure update

We have spent a few months working on upgrading our app framework Ruby on Rails to the latest version 7. We also upgraded ruby to the latest version 3.1.

While doing so, we also worked on increasing our test code coverage. We also ran tools such as rubocop to standardize our code.

We also upgraded our translation serialization system which previously relied on a custom serializer using YAML to use native Postgres JSONB fields. It looks like nothing, but migrating close to 90 million translations took us over a week!

Overall these upgrades were a lot of work, but were worth it, as they helped us increase our software quality, standardize the way we write code and increased the website performance while lowering our resources usage.

We have replaced our Translation Memory engine

We have been using Sphinx Search for almost 10 years (we’re not getting any younger are we? 😳) and it has served us well. However our database server PostgreSQL now integrates a great full-text search engine, and it is easier to maintain it than having both PostgreSQL and Sphinx running side by side. So we simplified our stack and now use PostgreSQL to run our translation memory.

We have also set up a series of tests and benchmarks to maintain and improve the translation memory speed and relevance, and we will keep improving on it.

All our infrastructure and providers are now in the European Union & GDPR compliant 🇪🇺

We hired a GDPR specialist and revised our Data Processing Agreement and improved our GDPR support.

We were also advised to make some changes on the providers we use (namely Amazon S3 hosted in the US and Mailchimp) to use similar services hosted in the European Union. Our Amazon S3 assets are now hosted in Germany and our newsletter by MailJet. You can see a list of all our providers on our Privacy page.

We value our users’ privacy so we’re now proudly made and hosted in the EU, and we’re also Carbon Neutral since 2017.

New homepage

We have a new homepage! You can see it when you are signed out of WebTranslateIt. The new homepage uses a new responsive design and includes a lot of new illustrations.

Auto-Translate

We’ve released a new feature for the organisations on the Enterprise plan: Auto-Translate.

Auto-Translate is a feature that lets you use the translations hosted on the different projects on your organization and automatically apply them to your projects right when a new translation candidate appears.

For instance if you add segments to a project and some of these new segments’ text have already been translated elsewhere (on your project or on another project hosted on your organization) it will use the other translations and apply them to your new segments.

It also works if a translator translates a segment on a project and if another similar segment exists elsewhere on your organization: as the first segment gets translated, the similar segments will get translated automatically.

New versions of the wti CLI tool

We’ve released several versions of our synchronisation tool wti. The latest changes include compatibility with ruby 3.1 and we’ve just added a new subcommand wti status path/to/file to see the translation statistics about a file.

If you don’t know about wti, you should try it it’s a great command-line tool to easily sync your language files with WebTranslateIt.

We also now have a docker package for wti.

Update to the Translation Interface

We’ve updated the Translation Interface with a brand new search bar which integrates case-sensitive and regex search. We hope you like these changes.

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New Organization API Endpoint: Delete a collaboration

By Edouard on September 29, 2022

Today we released a new API endpoint to delete a Collaboration.

A collaborator is a person working on your organization and projects. Deleting a collaboration does the following:

  • it removes the user from the organization,
  • it removes any project memberships,
  • it cancels any unaccepted invitations on your organization’s projects,
  • it removes any team memberships,
  • it cancels any unaccepted invitations on your organization’s teams.

So that person won’t be able to access anything on the organization.

I hope you will find this new feature helpful to manage your users. Thank you for using WebTranslateIt!