The WebTranslateIt Blog

I just released an important update to WebTranslateIt’s API.

The focus of this update is to give you full control on your strings and translations. The update adds 8 new endpoints:

• The File API gets a new Delete File endpoint, to delete a master language file.

• The Locale API gets a new Delete Locale endpoint, to delete a locale from a project.

• We now have a new String API, which allows you to get, create, update and delete strings. I’ll add shortly a new endpoint to search for strings using parameters.

• I also added a new Translation API to get and create translations for a string.

What can you do with this API?

Using this API, you can now translate virtually anything. For instance, you could create script translate fields from a database, mapping a field to a specific String, and retrieve their translations.

These new endpoints also enable developers to create a third-party desktop software to translate strings, using WebTranslateIt as a repository for translations.

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

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

This release fixes several minor bugs. The web_translate_it gem now adheres to semantic versioning, which is why this release number is made of only 3 digits.

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.

WebTranslateIt now supports Translation Memory Exchange (TMX) files.

TMX is an open XML standard for the exchange of translation memory data created by computer-aided translation and localization tools.

We now support over 27 different linguistic file formats.

WebTranslateIt now supports Babel Flash .xml files.

Babel Flash is a smart library to localize Flash projects. As its creator describes it:

Babel Flash is a free AS3 library whose goal is to make localizing your flash projects easier. It handles loading external font swfs and replace graphics and text on the fly. Setting it up can both be done programmatically or in the IDE, so it’s both programmer and artist friendly.

You can now localise these linguistic files using WebTranslateIt. We now support over 26 different linguistic file formats.

I just released another round of improvements to the translation memory server.

New ranking algorithm

The most important change is the matching algorithm. For the nitty-gritty details, the translation memory was previously using the BM25 algorithm. We now use another algorithm, which is a mix of BM25 with exact phrase matching. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now, and it gives much better results.

I also added the following tweaks:

Aberrations removal

The updated translation memory server removes aberrations. For instance, for a very short source string, you could get very long suggestions:

This is obviously not a good suggestion. The translation memory now reduces the weight to such suggestions and push the suggestion to the bottom of the list.

Pushing 100% matches to the top

The update translation memory server now improves the visibility of 100% Matches strings.

Here’s how a 100% Match was displayed before:

100% Match suggestions are now displayed more prominently and are separated from the other suggestions. You can still view the other suggestions by clicking on the “view xx suggestion” link.

I hope you will find these improvements useful. Thank you for using WebTranslateIt.