Announcing our first product: Web Translate It

Since a few months we’ve been working on a secret project. Do you have a website or an application you want to open to the world? Read on!

Did you know that the European Union has 23 official languages? That Spain has 4 official languages? That the spanish government’s websites are multilingual? That even though their languages are related, people from different Nordic Countries don’t understand each other? How many kilometers are in one mile?

You got it. Win a foreign market requires some internationalisation and localisation efforts.

Website or application internationalisation is not easy. Some developers cook a “home-made” translation system which is most of the time not very usable by the translation teams.

There are also a few translation solutions, but they too complicated to use and don’t allow easy communication within the translation team, or between the developer and the translation team. They also have poor support for iterative project development.

So, Web Translate It!

We decided to scratch that itch and develop ‘Web Translate It’ to make all that easy.

It’s still under development. We started working on it a few months ago and we already have an usable software, but some things aren’t quite finished yet.

We expect to have everything ready to launch by the end of August or early September and we’ll keep you posted about our progress on this blog.

Above: an idea of the project page on Web Translate It.

Web Translate It will be:

• web-based. You will use Web Translate It in your web browser over the internet. You don’t have to worry about anything: just work and collaborate easily.
• commercial. Although everything seems to be free on Internet nowadays, we develop software for a living. We believe our product will be superior than the open source alternatives and that it will worth every penny. We haven’t clearly defined the price yet, but we really want it to be fair, as in bring more value than it costs, and we will likely use the “pay as you go” model. At some point we will introduce a free plan for open source projects.
• a translation tool. We will support the translation files formats we’re used to in the course of our jobs: Gettext .pot, yml and Apple Strings (the iPhone and Mac apps translation format). We plan to support more file formats later on. We also plan to integrate a translation memory, although this feature may come a bit later.
• a communication tool. Stop emails! Assign jobs and deadlines on the tool itself. Ask questions to the project owner, all the project stakeholders will be able to communicate very easily, and everything will be really visible.
• a tool for developers. We’ll integrate Web Translate It to the major web development frameworks. We plan to integrate first those we use and love: Ruby on Rails and Django.

Get in touch

For frequent updates, subscribe to our Atom feed. If you want us to contact you as soon as we launch join our mailing list on the Web Translate It website.

We also have our customer support forum on GetSatisfaction if you have any ideas, questions or suggestions.