The WebTranslateIt Blog · Page 65

I just finished a new feature for Web Translate It and it is so much a change I would like you to try it first and get your feedback before rolling it on the main website.

This new feature is a completely rethought translation interface. I hope it makes it more efficient to work. Let’s see what’s new in this interface.

Enough said, go over at beta.webtranslateit.com and give it a try. Please note that the data used on this site is the live data and sync with the regular Web Translate It. It use the same database.

The first thing you will notice is that there is no more pagination. The page is endless: the more you scroll, the more strings are automatically loaded. This is very convenient to translate hundreds of strings in a row: you don’t have to interrupt your work to click on “next page” and wait for the next page to load: the next page is loaded when you’re about to be out of strings to work.

The interface is also much more minimalist than the current one. By default nothing is displayed but the content to translate. This is a great for reviewing your work.

When you hover a string, more information appear. Namely the key name of the string and a few options.

When you click on a string, a text area appears and let you compose or edit your translation.

When you are done, click save or just leave it for later: you can also save your translations in batch with the “Save my changes” button, which is much more efficient than the current “Save all” button.

Once the string is saved, your will notice the color in the right border has changed to red to orange: this is the status indicator. It means the string was “not translated” and it is not “not proofread”.

To proofread the string, click on the proofread button, and the status color dynamically update from dotted orange to plain green.

This is the scheme everywhere on Web Translate It: dotted stuff are things to do, plain stuff are things done. The colours give you a more precise indication of the status: green is for “done”, orange is for “not proofread” and red is for “not done at all”.

Less frequently used functionalities are gone in a menu you can activate by clicking on “Options”.

The most used functionalities such as commenting or proofread/unproofread are visible and usable by directly clicking the button.

I think you’ve got it! A finished project should look like a very long green line. Any string to do is easily identifiable.

Please share what you think about this on our forum.

If you haven’t tried Web Translate It yet, create a demo account with unlimited access that will allow you to try it after just one click.

I am pretty excited about this. When you are new to the tool or never heard of it, choosing a plan and creating a user account sure is intimidating. “What are the implications of what I am doing? Will I have to pay anything?”

If you only want to take a look at it, why not skipping this part?

In just a click you will get access to the full-fledged, top of the line Web Translate It plan. You can try it for 3 hours for free, at which point we will delete your demo account and all of its data.

To make your testing experience more enjoyable, this demo account come pre filled with an example project.

Give it a try!

A maintenance window is planned tonight for Web Translate It between 9PM to 9.30PM GMT as we are migrating our assets (Javascript and CSS and images) to a proper CDN.

If everything goes according to the plan there should be no downtime and you should only notice a nice speed boost :)

Edit 9.45PM: I am a bit late, but it is done. All Web Translate It’s static content (images, Javascript and CSS) are served by 4 different buckets (or instances of) Amazon S3. This should speed up the loading of these assets and give WTI’s server a bit more overhead to serve actual pages to you.

I just pushed a very small update to Web Translate It to fix a few user interfaces I had gripes with. Yep, it’s the second update of the day. The differences are quite subtle but I think they make a difference. Read on.

Better Activity Feed

The activity feed show the last activity on your project. It displays the last translations, the last comments and the last files uploaded to the system. The problem is that showing all the translations is sometimes a little bit too much information, which makes the activity feed useless in practice, because you miss the important things.

To fix this issue, the feed about translations are now grouped by author and language.

You can see the hidden translations by clicking on “XX worked a few more strings”. It toggles the rest of the translations the translator has worked on.

Comments

On the project page you can now see the comments you haven’t read yet. This is useful if you deactivated the email notifications for Web Translate It in your settings page.

There are also two subtle UI touches on the comment popup. The first one is the “Answer this question” button.

When you click it, it prepares your answer: the drop-down is automatically set to “answer” and the text area gets the focus. Like so:

The second new feature here is the “Mark as answered” button. It basically close the question without answering it. This is useful because sometimes the question has been answered via another medium (email, chat or phone).

Better language switch

There are more language switch throughout the pages and they are better. The old javascript-y toggles have been replaced by a simple drop-down, which are more efficient to use. Often simpler is better.

I hope you will appreciate this (very tiny) update, which should make your commenting experience much better!

Thank you for using Web Translate It.

These last two weeks have been hectic. Features-wise there is not much new, but a lot of important work has been done.

More supported browsers

Web Translate It now support Internet Explorer 7 and 8. We also support Firefox 3, Safari 3 and 4.

We don’t support and don’t have plans to support Internet Explorer 6. You will have a better experience using Web Translate It with a recent web browser such as Firefox 3 or Safari. We will work on supporting Firefox 2 in the next weeks.

Better comments

The commenting system is much better. You can now notify users from a comment.

This is very useful to ask a question about a string to whom it may concern.

Word counter

One useful feature for translators is the ability to count the number of words in a project. You can now request this data and Web Translate It will send you an e-mail with this information.

Payment system

Finally Web Translate It can accept payments. The payment system use Paypal for now. That was not an easy treat to implement and it took much longer than I expected.

Try Web Translate It

Web Translate It is getting better and better. Have you a website or software to translate, Web Translate It can help to make this task simpler. Check out our plans, they all come with a 1 month free trial.

If you have any questions, please let us know on our support forum or directly by email.