January is a wrap and it has been a pretty busy month.

The service uptime for January was 99,94%. That means that is to say Web Translate It was down for 24 minutes last month. It is up from the catastrophic 98,43% (11 hours, 41 minutes down) in December. This is much better, but my goal for February is to improve this.

Response time is slightly lower than last month, which is good (lower is better). I always do everything possible keep the service working, and working fast.

Feature-wise, there were 7 releases in January:

• New stats system with deferred calculations to calculate more stuff, faster.
• API and plugin enhancements so you can do more with your data.
• New reporting system to see the amount of strings and words over time and consequently bill your customers.
• Leaner interface, which makes the website load faster.
• Public projects. Web Translate It’s very first step in the world of crowd sourcing, and a huge improvement for Open Source projects.
• And finally, improved string history and threaded comments.

Web Translate It is in very active development and it is very exciting to see it quickly improving. I am always happy to hear your feedback if you have any suggestions to share.

So, what’s planned for February?

I plan to do 3 things: improve the Web Translate It plugin, improve the e-mail notifications and support Open Source projects better.

Better plugin

Well at its current state, it’s not really a plugin any more. If you don’t know it yet, Web Translate It has an open-source rubygem that provides a collection of useful rake tasks to sync back and forth your app’s language files with Web Translate It. If you use Ruby on Rails, there’s also a rack middleware built in that allow you to sync your files for each page requested.

A few weeks ago I pondered if I should make a plugin for other programming languages and frameworks. Now I think I won’t.

It would be a loss of time and energy. I would need to learn well different development frameworks in order to develop a plugin for them, and it would be a lot of work maintaining the different plugins and keeping up with their future versions.

I rather make one tool that works real good rather than three working poorly.

The next version of the plugin (or shall we call it client?) will be more generic, and the goal is to make it work well for any kind of project, as long as you have the programming language ruby installed on your machine.

Instead of rake tasks, the client will provide you with an handy executable you can run from any other programming language or framework. It will also be able to auto-configure itself as magically as possible.

If you want something native to your programming language, though, you can implement your own plugin, it is not very complicated.

Better E-mail notifications

To say it very frankly, Web Translate It’s e-mail notifications suck. If you have a large project with many translators, you just get too many e-mails and you probably already created a GMail filter for it. I will create some e-mail digests.

You will be able to choose the occurrence: once a week, once a day, every 4 hours or every 2 hours. Digests will only be sent if something happened since the last digest, and they contain a summary of your project’s activity since the last digest.

Better support for Open Source projects

I will work on a seamless integration with projects hosted on Github. Github is one of the largest open-source software hub.

There are two reasons I want to focus on this now:

• Web Translate It is a commercial software built on the shoulders of people who wrote open-source projects. I want to give back to the community what I took.
• Web Translate It needs to get known more, and supporting Open Source Software is best advertisement one can get!

Translating your project on github will be as simple as copy/pasting the address of your github project, and selecting where are the language files you want to translate.

---

That will be it! If you have any feedback, please share on the support forum. Thank you for using Web Translate It!

I just deployed a few improvements on the commenting system and on the string history page.

Improved Comments

On the project page

Comments on the project page are now grouped by thread, with the most recent comments on top.

Commenting on a string now creates a new “forum thread”, and viewing your comments and understanding how your project is going is much clearer.

But that’s not all: the comment’s status is also flagged for each thread: red if the thread has an answered question, blue if the thread has unread comments.

When you click on the link to read a comment, it will bring you to the comments section in the String History page, instead of on a specific comment page.

Comment your project

One new feature is the ability to comment on the project itself (as opposed as commenting on a string). When you click on “Post a comment” on the project page, a form appears.

This will be really useful to discuss about the projects without having to go to a third-party communication system.

Improved String History

The string history really needed some improvements. It just got more useful. It is now divided into 3 parts.

Latest translation

Which basically show you the latest translation made. From there, you can also translate and proofread the string.

Comments

A list of comments made on the string.

History

These are the changes in your translations over time. What’s new here is that the interface now displays the exact difference between the current version and the previous version. For example unproofread → proofread.

I hope you will enjoy this fresh round of improvements. Thank you for using Web Translate It!

I just rolled out a new version of Web Translate It. Projects can now be open to the public. This is useful for crowd-sourcing!

Reworked project homepage

If you visit your project pages, you will notice it has been reworked quite a bit.

The activity feed has been moved to a dedicated tab, and the project home page now feature a list of the latest comments made on the project.

New settings

There are also a few new options in the project settings.

You can now put a description for your project and a link to your project homepage. The description is formatted using Markdown, so you’re not bound to write a description here: you can use this field to give general instructions to the translation team, or anything else you think can be useful.

Private and public projects — Crowdsourcing

And this… Well this is a bigger thing. You can now make your project public and browsable by everyone. By default, new and existing projects are set to private, and to be able to translate or comment on your project, users will have to request an invitation.

It seems to be a little change (it was definitely not!), but it is actually the first step to use Web Translate It to crowd-source your project’s translations. It is only the first step, and that was a tough one.

It is also great for Open-Source projects to improve their visibility.

How does it work?

This is your project page you can see if you’re a project member.

If you make the project public, this is what everyone else will see. You can actually see it by yourself here.

In order to join the translation team, the user will have to request an invitation to the project manager. The user can do so by clicking on the invitation link.

You can directly your users to the invitation request page and provide their e-mail address in the URL, too. For instance: https://webtranslateit.com/projects/244-VLC-unofficial-/invitation_request?email=john.doe@webtranslateit.com

When the project manager will have accepted the invitation, the user will be able to translate the project.

This is really the simplest solution that could possibly work for this issue. This workflow will work fine for projects until you reach 3 translators per language. If your user base is very much larger than this and hundreds of users want to join the translation team (lucky you!), you will need a more advanced system to handle vandalisms, translation suggestions, and so on. I will progressively improve this feature in time with a voting system.

I hope you will find this new feature useful. Thank you for using Web Translate It.

Tomorrow Sunday the 24th I will be performing some database optimisations between 11AM and 12AM GMT.

The service will be up during most of this time. However these optimisations require to restart the database server, so Web Translate It might have the hiccup for a minute or two during this maintenance window.

Follow @webtranslateit for live updates.

I just set up a new customer support site at Tender for Web Translate It.

Support for Web Translate It is now located at help.webtranslateit.com.

You will find there a knowledge base, a forum and a helpdesk.

If you are not a Web Translate It user, you can ask questions without creating a user account. If you are a Web Translate It user, you should already have a user account there.

Finally, all support requests sent to support@atelierconvivialite.com will be forwarded to the new support site.

I just pushed a new version of Web Translate It. This new version include a couple improvements as well as a few bug fixes.

Redesigned action buttons on the translation interface

The action buttons on the translate page were only visible when hovering the string. While it was great for reviewing strings, several users reported it was a bit confusing. Besides, the comment button was lacking too much visibility.

So I redesigned these action buttons. The goal was for them to gain enough attention, while staying fairly invisible to afford a comfortable reviewing of the strings.

The buttons were a bit jammed in the upper right corner. I gave them some more padding to give them some more importance. I also made them bolder, while making them more greyer. The result is that the buttons are more noticeable while being less visible.

When hovering, the buttons gain some more contrast, making them more visible.

I think it is a good trade-off. I will tweak this up more in the upcoming releases, please let me know if you have any comments.

Leaner Web Translate It

493,29KB. That’s how much Web Translate It did weight before this release.

The big guy was the Javascript framework PrototypeJS with Scriptaculous, served via Google AJAX API. The Javascript framework is served non minified by Google and was totalling 345KB. Ouch!

318,77KB. That’s how much it weights now. That’s still quite a bit but it’s 200KB less already, without removing any feature.

How?

I switched the Prototype + Scriptaculous Javascript framework (345KB not minified) to the latest jQuery, which is served minified by Google: 68KB.

I had to rewrite all the Javascript front-end to make it work with jQuery but it worth it: everything is much simpler, and I killed a few bugs along the way. It is very likely you will notice some micro-improvements when using Web Translate It.

Today I improved and launched a new parser for the importer used for YAML files on Web Translate It. The previous parser was buggy and inefficient.

The default Ruby on Rails implementation for i18n, so-called “Simple” use YAML to store its files.

A YAML file looks like so:

fr:
  some_key:
    key: value
    # a comment
    hello: bonjour

The YAML parser used until today was home-made. It used to browse every line in the YAML file, extracted keys, values and comments.

Really good YAML parsers exist for pretty much every language, but they don’t allow me to extract comments and display them on the translation interface, and it was a no-go when I implemented this feature.

My parser was working fine with really simple YAML files. In practice many customers had problems importing their YAML files because my parser did not support some edge-cases.

As Web Translate It grows, a few more customers needed to be able to import YAML files. As a consequence, last night and today a few more import jobs failed for a customer. I am really sorry about that.

Being able to actually import YAML files is obviously more important that being able to extract comments. On top of that, my parser had become incredibly complex and I felt I would not be able to fix the issue in a simple way, and to maintain a such hullabaloo.

So I switched to the vanilla ruby YAML parser, which not only parses files really well, but also parses them really fast. The only downside is that it is not possible to extract and import comments from the YAML file any longer.

A note of caution with YAML

Be cautious when writing copy in your YAML file because everything your write in the file is interpreted by the parser (by your application as well as by Web Translate It). Words like true, false, yes, no are interpreted as the booleans True or False by YAML parsers.

Consider this YAML file:

en:
  date:
    true: foo
    false: bar
    yes: baz
    no: boo

It will be interpreted as:

en:
  date:
    true: foo
    false: bar

Because yes == true and false == no in YAML, the parser consider the compounds yes: baz and no: boo duplicate respectively true: foo and false: bar. If you must use yes and no as keys, wrap them around quotes, like so:

en:
  date:
    true: foo
    false: bar
    "yes": baz
    "no": boo

Same goes for the value. This:

en:
  date:
    a_key: yes
    b_key: no

will be interpreted as:

en:
  date:
    a_key: true
    b_key: false

So wrap them around quotes:

en:
  date:
    true: "yes"
    false: "no"

Thank you for your patience with this issue, and thank you for using Web Translate It.

How to translate in Web Translate It from Édouard Brière on Vimeo.

New in Web Translate It: save and next should make your translating experience easier. Watch the screencast!

View the screencast in HD at vimeo.

A bit more than a week ago, I announced that Web Translate It was using a new system to generate stats. If the new stats engine makes pages using statistics load faster —which is already a great feature— it was in fact the first part of a bigger feature: project reporting.

On your project page, you now have a new tab: Statistics.

If you have been using Web Translate It these past days you should already have enough data for populating this page.

Let’s have a quick tour and see what this new feature does.

Detailed stats

The new stats engine not only counts the amount of strings by status, it also counts the amount of words. The statistics page displays all this data.

Deltas

Web Translate It also calculates deltas. This is the variation of the amount of strings between one day and another.

If nothing happened on your project during some period of time (for example during the week-end), then there is nothing to display. In the example below, nothing happened between the 7th and the 11th of January.

Graphs

The graphs represent the amount of strings, by status, over time. Hover the graph and you will get a bit more information.

I hope you will find project reporting useful. Let me know if you have any suggestion or comments. Thank you for using Web Translate It.

I just updated the API with a few improvements and a new endpoint.

Improvements

The locale endpoint, which allows you to fetch a list of locales accepted by your project is now capable of returning xml, json or yaml by simply appending the format you want at the end of the URL.

For example, if you want your list of locales in YAML, you would call /api/projects/04b254da22a6eb301b103f848e469ad494eea47d/locales.yaml and it would return something like so:

--- 
locales: 
- name: French, France
  code: fr_FR

New Endpoint: Project information

This new endpoint can be very useful to develop an advanced integration between Web Translate It and your application.

It returns 5 things:

• the project name,
• a list of locales accepted by the project,
• the project source locale,
• the language file ids and names.

The data is available in xml, json or yaml.

An example of the data structure in YAML would be:

--- 
project: 
  name: Web Translate It
  source_locale: 
    name: English, United Kingdom
    code: en_GB
  target_locales: 
  - name: French, France
    code: fr_FR
    type: Locale
  project_files: 
  - name: fr.yml
    id: 1175
  - name: en.yml
    id: 1174

I hope these improvements will make easier for everyone to integrate Web Translate It with their application and develop awesome extensions.

For detailed API specifications, check API Information on Web Translate It.

The API and on the Web Translate It plugin for Ruby on Rails. All of what follows use Web Translate It’s API which is only available on paying accounts.

API upgrade

The new API use a different URL and allow users to fetch their strings file by file. This is especially important for projects with several files to fetch their strings via the API.

The older API is deprecated, but will keep functioning indefinitely, so there is absolutely no need to update anything on your side if the endpoint you currently use works well for your project.

The other new feature is the ability to update a language file through the API. This can be really useful if you want to automatise the workflow between your project and Web Translate It.

What you do of it is entirely up to you. It could be used by a nightly or weekly task to upload an updated version of your master language file. This way new strings would be automatically added on Web Translate It.

For more information, I invite you to refer to the new API documentation for developers on Web Translate It.

Rails plugin upgrade

The plugin for integrating Web Translate It with Ruby on Rails projects has had a nice update today and now use the new API.

Once installed and set up, it allows you —if you want to— to sync the translations between your app with Web Translate It for every page requested. This is great for translators to test their work on a staging website.

It also comes with 3 rake tasks to help you manage your translations:

• rake trans:fetch:all to fetch all your translations in all languages,
• rake trans:fetch[fr_FR] to only fetch the french translations,
• rake trans:upload[en] to send a new version of your language file to Web Translate It.

Grab it on Github if you haven’t already!

Thanks for using Web Translate It!

Happy new year! Here are a bunch of improvements for 2010.

Statistics

This is not really a new feature, but rather a different way of calculating statistics. Instead of processing them on every page load and asking you to wait a few seconds until it loads, stats calculation is deferred and calculated in the background. This is the same system used for the language file importer/exporter and the search engine’s indexer.

Since you don’t have to wait for the stats calculations to finish, the pages load much faster. You will sometimes see a notice indicating the stats are not up to date.

Web Translate It will then bring the stats up to date and automatically display them when available. It usually takes less than two seconds.

The filters and the stats section on the top of the translation interface have been redesigned to be clearer and easier to use.

This improvement is the first part of an upcoming new feature: project reporting. With reporting, you will be able to get detailed stats about your project over time. This requires the ability to generate costly statistics without making the website slower.

On top of the statistics improvements, many other tweaks have been done to make the translation interface load faster.

Progress bars on language page

The language page now has a progress bar indicating the percentage of completed and translated strings for that project. Of course, it also use deferred calculations.

Better Markdown help

Comments on Web Translate It are formatted using Markdown, an easy to use markup language. The help section about Markdown was very poor. You now have a decent help page for helping you to write better comments.

I open-sourced it if you need this help page on your own project.

That’s it! I hope you will enjoy these improvements, thank you for using Web Translate It!

Web Translate It is now on feature freeze. What I am currently working on right now is too big to be finished before the Christmas break. So that’s it for 2009!

What’s coming up next?

In the near future (January 2010), I will focus on enhancing existing feature. The stats and the API will be updated.

Stats

The new stats will be able to count strings, words, and keep a daily history. You will also be able to generate nice graphs displaying the amount of strings and words per language over time.

To make this work smoothly, some work has to be done under the hood. Calculations have to be deferred instead of being made again and again for every page load. This will use once again the same technology than the file import/export workers that proved to work really well. About 30% of Web Translate It’s calculations currently take place in the background.

The advantage is that not only you will have more detailed stats, but the pages using stats will load faster.

New API

The current API works really well, but doesn’t allow you to fetch a specific language file. This is a problem if you have several language files in your project.

The new API will allow you do just that. Although not advertised anywhere, it is actually already in production and used by some customers.

The API will also allow you to upload an update for a translation file. You could for example set up a periodic task on your server to update your translation files on Web Translate It nightly.

The Web Translate It plugin for Ruby on Rails 2.3 will also be updated to integrate these changes.

Crowdsourced translations

By the end of January, I will tackle crowdsourced translations.

I will chunk this large feature into several, simple iterations. For the first iteration I will focus on working a very simple, yet fully functional crowdsourcing interface.

• Your own user community will be able to request for a translator account. I will implement login by OpenID to make it easier for everyone to register.
• You will be able to accept or refuse these requests.
• Your community will be able to suggest new translations or vote for existing translations.
• You will be able to make the interface visible publicly or not.
• You will be able to choose among 3 different translation strategies for each language. For example:
  • Traditional: let professional translators translate that language.
  • Half Crowdsourcing: Let your users translate and suggest translations, and hire professional translators to proofread their translations. You save a fair share of the translation cost, while having high quality translations.
  • Full Crowdsourcing: Let your users translate and vote to decide which translations will go live. It can work very well if you have a huge user community for that language. It usually doesn’t work so well for smaller user communities.

That’s pretty much everything I have planned for now.

I wish you a pleasant holiday, see you in 2010!

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please take the survey. It’s always good to get your voice heard, and I always consider all of your suggestions.

The results have been incredibly useful. Thank you everyone!

Appreciation Rating

Everyone who took the survey think Web Translate It’s service and support is good: 100% of you would recommend it. This is fantastic, I am glad you appreciate it, and thanks for all the kind words in the survey, I appreciate that :)

Pricing

When it comes to pricing, the answers depend on whether the interviewee is a developer or a translator.

Translation agencies, translators and large websites find the price well adjusted. Translation agencies use Web Translate It quite a lot, so the ratio time/monthly price is fair.

Development agencies and freelance developers think Web Translate It a bit pricey. I understand it just “doesn’t worth it”. The entry level is 39€/month, this is a big cost for a freelance developer or a small development agency for something you don’t need all the time.

I want to fix this. I will get back to this topic later in this post.

Features

This is not very surprising, the most wanted features also differ from the interviewee’s job. Everyone want features to make their work easier.

Developers want integration to a Version Control System, a better API (to upload files), the ability to attach files and images to comments and have a term base.

Translation agencies would rather have better translation tools: Search and replace comes first, the ability to branch translations and a have translation memory.

It helped me establishing my roadmap for the next few months. I will share it with you in another post this week.

Suggestions

Pricing

Someone suggested a pricing based per project. You would upload your strings, you would pay a certain sum, and then you’d get access to Web Translate It for as long as you want. If later you have more strings to translate, you upload them, pay for them and off you go.

It makes sense for developers who work on projects that have very little changes over time: once the project is translated and live, they don’t need Web Translate It much.

I completely understand that Web Translate It is overpriced for this kind of use. It’s a bit like taking a Hummer to go to the supermarket.

It was the business idea I had when I started working on Web Translate It. After more thought, I noticed this business model wouldn’t work well for me.

Web Translate It is a service, and I see two ways of selling a good and reliable service:

• either by selling it monthly at a certain price. This price includes the time my customers don’t use it (week-end, holiday, when no work). This is what companies do with their employees.
• or by selling it only when my customers need it. This extra flexibility comes at an extra price. This is what companies do when hiring consultants and freelancers: they are usually paid more than employees, but if used sparingly, they cost less to the company.

Consultants and freelancers’ businesses would not work if they were paid once and used indefinitely. There has to have a time limit.

What I am going to do

You will be able to top-up your Web Translate It account with some credit. This credit will stay on your account as long as you want and won’t lose value over time (unlike some dirty phone companies). With that credit you will be able to buy time on Web Translate It, depending on your needs of the moment.

To keep things simple, time will be divided by day —the day pass— or by month —the monthly pass.

It’s a pretty good deal: for example, if you translate a small project, you probably only need a few days. You can buy day passes, which give you access to Web Translate It for the time you need. After that, if you don’t need to translate anything for a while, it won’t cost you a thing.

When the time is up, your project will be automatically locked, so you won’t be able to access or edit it, unless you use another day pass or monthly pass.

The date is not defined yet. I believe it will be implemented sometime during the first semester of 2010.

Pricing is not defined either, but the idea is that if you have an occasional use of Web Translate It, this will be really cheaper than subscribing a monthly plan. Of course, if you use Web Translate It daily, monthly plans will be cheaper. I will announce more about it when I’ll have decided it.

Work offline

Someone suggested to have the ability to work offline, and I am really enthusiastic about this idea. I for one love to cut the wire sometimes.

I can’t promise a date for this, as I have a lot of pressing feature to implement, but I will definitely keep this suggestion in mind, thanks for sharing!

Do you have other suggestions?

If you have other suggestions or ideas to share, please let me know by e-mail or on the support forum.

Thank you for all the feedback, and thank you for using Web Translate It!

Web Translate It has a rather large database of languages, territories and scripts that is used internally.

It is used to display language lists, or for the importers to figure out the plural forms. I thought some of this data could be interesting and valuable to other people.

This week-end I decided to expose this data to everyone. Here you go:

• Language database

• Territory database

It is pretty cool, I am navigating through the links since an hour now :)

You could probably find this information on Wikipedia, but the difference here is that is structured and to the point. For example, we know the relationships between a language, a territory and a script.

French for example is spoken in Belgium, Canada, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, Monaco and Senegal.

Or, Mongolian is spoken in and is written using the scripts Cyrillic and Mongolian

The other interesting data is the plural forms rules and code. When you translate a plural string from one language to another, Web Translate It automatically creates the plural rule for the target language, using the right plural forms.

For example, here is the plural rule for Russian, and here another one for Polish.

Making this data available to the public could also let people report eventual mistakes in this data.

I don’t have plans to make this data editable by users, like a wiki. This data is very critical to some Web Translate It features, so I’d rather be the sole maintainer.

I am progressively refining Web Translate It’s plans. The first step to that process is that effective immediately, new subscriptions will now offer a 10-day free trial. This is less than before, as it used to be a 30-day free trial.

This only affects new accounts. If you are currently on free trial, nothing changes: you will get all of the 30-day trial as promised.

Why?

Because offering 30 days of service for free is a bit hard on us at the moment. Web Translate It’s service is very young —it launched merely 2 months ago— and 30 days is half of our age.

Besides, I believe 10 days is still plenty of time to evaluate Web Translate It and actually know if this is the right service for you. Web Translate It’s service is pretty simple and new customers usually know after using it for a few minutes if this is the tool they need or not. If you need more time for evaluation, drop me an e-mail at support@atelierconvivialite.com and I will be happy to extend your trial period.

Also, besides the free trial, we offer two other ways to evaluate Web Translate It for free.

First, the free account which affords translating up to 500 strings. This is ideal for small projects, like an iPhone application or a small website.

Or if you have bigger needs, you can try the demo account, which lets you upload as many strings as you want. The only limit is time —3 hours, after which your account is deleted.

Do you like or dislike Web Translate It? I would appreciate if you take 2 minutes to fill this quick survey about Web Translate It.

The survey is anonymous if you want, and all the fields are optional.

Quite often when translating a project, some strings added to the language file are not meant to be translated. Letting the translators know that these strings are not to translate is complicated. What about just removing them from the interface?

Managers now have the ability to hide these strings directly from Web Translate It’s interface.

To hide a string, it’s easy: from the translation interface, click on “options” and then click “hide this string”.

Hidden strings can be seen in the “Strings not to translate” category. From this category, you can also make a string visible to the translators, just the same way you hid it.

I hope you will find this very small improvement useful. Thank you for using Web Translate It.

Atelier Convivialité’s technical support will close for christmas holiday from the 19th until the 27th of December.

Obviously, Web Translate It’s service will be open as usual, there’s no such thing as website holiday :)

Following the server saga, the server migration worked without encountering any issues. Web Translate It’s service has been down for merely 20 minutes.

You should be properly directed to the new server by browsing https://webtranslateit.com. If you are not, you should see this page which will give you detailed instructions to flush your DNS cache.

You will notice a speed boost when loading pages, especially for the slow pages such as the translation interface or the API.

The previous server was a dedicated server, with a single processor having one core, and 1GB or ram. We completely grew out of this server, especially with regards to memory consumption. The server was running the whole website and only 1 worker, used for import/export of your language files, as well as miscellaneous resource-intensive tasks such as project deletion, search engine indexing and e-mail sending.

The new server is a Virtual Private Server from Linode with two processors having four cores each, and also 1 GB of ram. Surprisingly, the faster processors have drastically reduced the server’s overall memory consumption: this server can now run the whole website, as well as 3 workers and still have a comfortable memory overhead. With 3 workers, you will never have to wait long for your import or export jobs to complete.

Also, the memory size is now extendable: if Web Translate It needs more memory, I can resize the server and instantly get more ram. No need to change server any longer.

I hope you will appreciate the increased speed and reliability it will provide.