The WebTranslateIt Blog

i18n news and Product Updates about WebTranslateIt

web_translate_it rubygem v2.0.3 released

By Edouard on August 9, 2012

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

This version 2.0.3 is a minor new version which includes a few improvements and bug fixes. It also restores the compatibility with ruby 1.8.6.

You can read about all the changes in the history file on Github.


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.

Search Improvements

By Edouard on July 6, 2012

This week I released a few improvements to segment searching to WebTranslateIt.

Under the hood, I completely rewrote the search engine feature. Search was previously powered by Sphinx. While this is an extremely fast search engine, it had several important drawbacks which prevented me to implement often requested features, so I decided to rewrite search to use SQL queries directly against the database.

New feature: search for a key name or a translation

The new search system can now let you search specifically for a segment’s key or for a source or target translation.

It is really easy to use: type a query, then select whether you’d like to search for a key, or a text from the source translation or target translation. Of course, you can always search by all criteria like before, which is good to quickly find something.

Power users: regular expression search

You can now also search for a segment or a translation using a regular expression.

You can also combine this new feature with specific segment key or translation searching.

(Click to view larger)

What’s great is that all these advanced search results can also be combined with the usual filters, categories, statistics and batch operations, so this is really powerful.

On the following example, I search for all completed segments located in the file config/locales/default/en.yml whose key matches the regular expression ^activerecord(.*)blank$.

(Click to view larger.

You can see this specific query live here)

Other improvements

The new search feature should be more reliable. The previous system kept an index of your segments and required to be fully re-indexed from time to time. The drawback was that it wasn’t possible to search for segments while it was reindexing, which means you couldn’t actually use search for several minutes.

This is no longer the case. You segments should now always be searchable.

On top of that the search results should also work much better with foreign characters.


I hope you will like this batch of improvements to the search facility and that it will make your localization work easier. Thank you for using WebTranslateIt.

Changes to the Bing Translator API

By Edouard on July 3, 2012

Microsoft is deprecating its current Bing Translator API in favour of a new API you can find on the Azure Marketplace. From now on, all new API tokens delivered by Microsoft aren’t compatible with the current implementation of Bing Translator in WebTranslateIt.

Today I released an update to WebTranslateIt to support the new Bing Translator API, so you can now use the new Bing Translator credentials delivered on the Azure Marketplace with WebTranslateIt.

Note that since the new Bing API use a new authentication mechanism, your older credentials aren’t compatible with the new Translator API either.

How to use it?

First, head over to WebTranslateIt’s documentation to learn how to get your new Bing Translator API credentials.

Once you have your Client ID and Client Secret tokens, go to your project settings and paste these credentials to the respective fields and that should be it.

I currently use the older version of Bing Translator API. Should I migrate to the new system?

Yes. I heard Microsoft will decommission their old API soon, so you should definitely migrate your project to the new Bing Translator API.

How much does it cost?

The new Bing Translator API is no longer free with unlimited access. They offer different plans, including a free plan depending on your usage.


Should you have any questions, please visit the support site and I will get right back to you. Thank you for using WebTranslateIt.

web_translate_it rubygem v2.0.2 released

By Edouard on June 7, 2012

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

This version 2.0.2 is a minor new version which includes one improvement and one bug fix.

Support for pagination on String and Term APIs

If you are using the WebTranslateIt::String.find_all and WebTranslateIt::Term.find_all methods, you’ll be happy to know these methods now automatically paginate to fetch all your strings and terms. So if you have thousands of segments to fetch you can implement something like this:

https://gist.github.com/2881038

Better error messages

The WebTranslateIt API was recently changed to return error messages as JSON hashes. The web_translate_it gem was updated to implement this improvement.


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.