The WebTranslateIt Blog

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

Fixes

This new version fixes an issue with autofetch for Ruby on Rails projects.

Improvements

This new version adds one new feature to the wti pull command. It now lets you specify a file path or a directory path to pull. For instance wti pull config/locales/javascripts/* will only pull the files located in the config/locales/javascripts directory.

$ wti pull config/locales/js/*
# Pulling files on WebTranslateIt
 config/locales/js/en.yml                           | 27443c4..27443c4  Skipped
 config/locales/js/fr.yml                           | f161bb9..f161bb9  Skipped
Pulled 2 files at 6 files/sec, using 1 threads.

Another improvement is that all commands now report the current project’s name. This is useful for larger projects spread accross different WebTranslateIt projects.

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Install or Upgrade

To install web_translate_it, please refer to the gem documentation.

To upgrade web_translate_it to its latest version, type in a terminal: gem install web_translate_it.

In your project settings, the option to automatically send e-mail notifications when new segments have been added got a little more clever. You can now choose who WebTranslateIt will contact: the translation teams, the management team or both.

This update will make it easier to integrate WebTranslateIt to your workflow.

We just released a new feature on WebTranslateIt: custom plural rules. This feature is fairly technical, and will only be useful for developers who need to define their own plural rules.

Plural rules is a feature proposed by some i18n frameworks to help handle the plurals of nouns or unit expressions in different languages.

Some languages have two forms, like English. Some languages have only a single form and some languages have multiple forms.

Plural rules for many languages are listed by the Unicode CLDR project.

WebTranslateIt use CLDR as its reference and when you translate a plural segment from one language to another, WebTranslateIt knows how many text boxes the translation needs.

CLDR’s data is great, but sometimes plural rules in some languages are contested. For instance in Portuguese, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Turkish, Wolof…

It’s very difficult to know who’s right and who’s wrong. Hopefully Unicode will handle these issues, verify the claims with experts and fix the rules if they contain mistakes.

In the meanwhile WebTranslateIt follows the CLDR rules, so if you use WebTranslateIt, you also follow this convention.

But what if you disagree and want to use the rule you feel is right?

You can now define your own plural rules. To do so, go to your locales & statistics page, click to edit the language you’d like to change and there, click on “Customize plural rules”.

There, you will be able to edit the plural rule. The plural rule is defined in YAML:

--- 
human:
  other: "0-999, 1.2…"
po:
  nplurals: 1
  plural: "0"
yml:
  other: "everything else"

The above rule defines a language with one unique plural rule: other. Let’s say your translator says that there is actually 2 plural rules: one for when the quantifier equals 1, other otherwise.

You would just have to edit the plural rule to:

--- 
human: 
  one: "1"
  other: "0-999, 1.2…"
po: 
  nplurals: 2
  plural: "n != 1"
yml: 
  one: 1
  other: "everything else"

I hope you will find this new feature useful. Thank you for using WebTranslateIt.

We just added a great new feature to WebTranslateIt, which could save you from losing some work.

If you have unsaved translations and close your web browser window (or click on a link which takes you out of the translation interface) a popup window will warn you that your changes will be lost. This gives you one last chance to get back to the translation interface and save your changes.

We added a new option in your project’s settings that lets you choose how your files should be generated when it encounters missing translations.

By default, blank translations will be exported as blank in your target language files, but you can now choose to fall back to the source language if a translation is missing.