New in Web Translate It: Translation validations

I just added translation validations checks to Web Translate It.

When translating software, language files often contain what we call “interpolated variables” among the text to translate. In this segment for instance:

%{person_name} could not be found.

%{person_name} is a variable. The text of the variable shouldn’t be translated and exactly match the source text, or it will break the software being translated. However it often happens that translators translate the variable.

By default, Web Translate It now checks whether the variables are matching and prevents the translator from saving a broken string.

If you are really sure of what you are doing, you can bypass this validation check by unticking the box.

Web Translate It currently recognizes the following variables: {variable}, ruby-style %{variable} or {{variable}}, and C-style variables such as %d or %s.

I hope you will find this improvement useful, translation validations was by far the most requested feature on Web Translate It.

Edit 01/08/2011: I released an improvement to this feature.