I’m saddened to learn of Steve Jobs’ passing. He inspired generations of people to do great things. He certainly inspired me in what I do today.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

I just released an update to WebTranslateIt’s API, which now accept two API keys for a project:

• the usual private token, which authenticates read and write API endpoints,

• a public token, which only authenticates read API endpoints.

Developers should use the new public token to develop features where the API token will be exposed (when developing a Javascript client for instance). You’ll find the new public token in your project settings.

Finally, WebTranslateIt now supports JSONP for all API endpoints. You will find more information about that in the API documentation.

Developer comments are instructions or help for translators left by developers in a locale file.

They are very different from regular comments. Comments are meant to be used for discussion, whereas developer comments as meant to be used for leaving a brief instruction to a translator.

When importing most language files, WebTranslateIt automatically extracts these developer comments and displays them in the translation interface, so they are visible to translators.

You can author or edit a developer comment from the web interface. Click on the “option” button, then “Details” (keyboard shortcut: press the d key after selecting a string).

A modal window appears and lets you type a comment. The length of a developer comment is limited to 140 characters to force you to keep your message short: these instructions should convey the idea quickly to translators.

Advanced features

Did you know you can upload and attach screenshots to developer comments to illustrate your comment? Use it to upload a screenshot of your app to show where a string is located, for instance.

Perhaps the killer feature is that developer comments are formatted using Markdown. The Markdown syntax allows you can create links, display images… the possibilities are almost limitless.

In this example, I used the markdown syntax to display an image inline.

Now, here’s real-life example: one of our users pushed the usefulness of this feature even further. They use WebTranslateIt to translate a list of products for an online shop pulled from their database. They wanted to convey more context to translators: how different is this shoe look compared to this other shoe?

They had the idea of programmatically format their developer comments so a small thumbnail representing their product is displayed on the translation interface for each string. Is there a better way to give context to a translator than that?

I just released a large update to WebTranslateIt’s translation suggestion system. What’s new?

Term Base Integration

Translation suggestions now integrate with the Term Base. What’s the Term Base? It’s a glossary of recurrent terms in your project. You can read more about it here.

When a term from your term base is detected, the translation interface will automatically pull its translation for you. Click on a term to copy the term to the textarea.

Adding terms to the term base can be a lot of work, but this integration makes it worth your time, as it really helps with translation consistency.

New translation suggestion algorithm

Prior to this upgrade, we used suggestions from Google Translate (ranked first), suggestions from translations from your own project, and suggestions from the Global Translation Memory (which contains translations coming from Projects which chose to contribute their translations to the system).

The new Translation Memory system use a more elaborate algorithm coupled with a ranking system.

The biggest difference with the previous algorithm is that it ranks suggestions better, and only uses Google Translate suggestions if the suggestions from WebTranslateIt have a bad ranking.

It is also able to pull out up to 20 different suggestions. By default we only display the 3 first translations, but you can see more by clicking on “view more suggestions”.

Feedback

I hope the new translation suggestion system works better for you. If you have feedback to share, don’t hesitate to let me know on the support website. 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 brings one important speed improvement, as well as an important change in the configuration file.

Speed Improvements

This release use threads to download files. It means the tool can now download several files in parallel, which makes for faster syncs. The amount of threads used depends on the amount of files to download.

For instance this project contains 8 files. wti pull will use 3 threads and will pull 3.8 files per second.

This other project contains more than a thousand files. It used to take several minutes to sync. With the new wti client it now takes a few seconds. Here wti pull use 20 threads and pulls 96 files per second.

Configuration File change

I also changed the default configuration file name for this release.

The wti gem was originally designed as a Ruby on Rails plugin, so the default file name was config/translation.yml, as this is the default location where one put configuration files in Ruby on Rails.

The gem was downloaded more than 20K times, and is used to sync hundreds of projects developed many different languages, so this default location doesn’t make much sense now. The new configuration file location is now .wti at the root of your project.

You don’t have to change anything for this to work. The first time you use the new wti gem, it’ll propose you to migrate your configuration file automatically.

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.