The WebTranslateIt Blog

I just updated Web Translate It’s text helper, which should be of great help when translating code in software.

The new text helper highlights variables in red. Variables shouldn’t be changed by translators by all means. Web Translate It currently detects 4 kind of variables: {variable}, ruby-style %{variable} or{{variable}}, and C-style variables such as %d or %s.

HTML code is displayed in light grey. This code shouldn’t be translated and be copy/pasted as is. Text to translate within HTML code is now highlighted in green.

I hope this improvement will make it easier to translate your projects.

I just released a new version of the web_translate_it gem, which fixes two minor bugs.

Here’s the changelog:

• Fix: Broken links on wti server.

• Fix: Avoid crashes on blank checksums (ticket #53). This bug could happen when the file checksum is not yet calculated by WTI server, typically when doing a wti push then a wti pull too quickly.

• Update Sinatra to 1.2.6.

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.

Web Translate It now supports PHP array files. These language files are often used in place of Gettext to localize PHP applications.

The files should look like so:

 <?php
$LANG = array(
    'January' => 'January',
    '_February' => 'February',
    '_March' => 'March',
    '_April' => 'April',
    '_May' => 'May',
    '_June' => 'June',
    '_July' => 'July',
    '_August' => 'August',
    '_September' => 'September',
    '_October' => 'October',
    '_November' => 'November',
    '_December' => 'December',
);?>

The new version of Web Translate It integrates discussions. Discussions is basically an integrated forum for your projects.

The discussions page lists all comments made on strings your project, and also allows you to start new discussion threads for discussing topics regarding the project’s localization.

To get started, click on “Start a discussion” on the Discussions page.

The other reason of migrating Web Translate It to a new architecture wasn’t only improving page speed. It was also to be able to develop a new feature: custom locales.

What is a locale?

A locale is a set of parameters that defines the user’s language, country and any special variant preferences that the user wants to see in their user interface. Usually a locale identifier consists of a language identifier and a region identifier.

When you create a locale on Web Translate, a tool assists you to build your locale. It maps your locale to a locale known by Web Translate It.

It creates well formed locales. For instance en, en-GB, en-GB_Latn, ru_Cyrl, etc. This prevents users from creating locales that don’t make sense, for instance en_Arab (English with script Arabic) or fr_Cyrl (French with script Cyrillic).

This is useful, because Web Translate It has a lot of information about locales in database, for instance the locale directionality (Left to Right or Right to Left?) or the locale plural rules and helps the translator translate accordingly.

One drawback, though, is that it forces you to use already existing locales.

Why would you want to create custom locales?

Depending on your workflow, you sometimes need to create “fake” locales to hold a temporary copy.

For instance, if your development team write an English copy that needs to be proofread, you might want to create a fake locale “English by developers”. The copy in this locale will, in turn, be modified and proofread by a professional proofreader before being translated into other languages.

Another reason could be that your app needs a specific custom locale based on a very specific location. There can be many good reasons.

So, how to build a specific locale?

In the Locale manager, start by choosing a base locale. Then, click on “Create a specific locale” to toggle additional options.

These additional options will be postfixed to the base locale code and name.

• Postfix code is a code that will be postfixed to the locale code. For instance dev.
• Postfix description is the description of the postfix you add. For Instance “by developers”.

This will generate a new custom locale with the code en_dev and name “English by developers”.