The WebTranslateIt Blog

Web Translate It now allows you to navigate the translation interface and translate strings using keyboard shortcuts. This is a great new feature, I hope you will like it.

When you load the translation interface, you will notice the first string in the list is now highlighted with a yellow background.

It means the string is selected. You can interact with selected strings in many ways.

Navigation

Press the ↓ key to select the string underneath.

Press ↑ key to move one string up.

Finally, translate any selected string by pressing the enter key.

Using keyboard shortcuts in Web Translate It is very simple and similar in many ways to other spreadsheet applications: up and down to move, enter to edit.

Editing a string

Opened strings now automatically load the translation suggestions. You can apply a suggestion by using key combinations:

• Ctrl 1 applies the first suggestion,
• Ctrl 2 applies the second suggestion,
• Ctrl 3 the third, etc.

You can also save a string using Ctrl s, or leave the string without saving using esc.

Advanced navigation

On highlighted strings, you can also use the following shortcuts:

• p for proofreading or unproofreading a string,
• c to comment on a string
• v to paste the source text on a string,
• → displays the translation history for that string,
• ← brings you back to the translation interface from that page.

You will find some great help about all these shortcuts by clicking on the “Keyboard shortcuts available” link on the translation interface, or by hitting the h key anytime on the translation interface.

I hope you will find this improvement useful. Thank you for using Web Translate It.

I released a major upgrade to Web Translate It yesterday evening.

This is a great update, which took 3 months in the making. It focuses on improving the Web Translate It’s performance, uses a brand new architecture for assigning translations to a locale, and introduces more than 7 new features. Here’s a quick overview of what changed. Additional posts introducing features will be post throughout the week.

Simpler design

This is the first design update since Web Translate It’s launch back in October 2009. The redesign focus on:

• Reducing the vertical overhead by getting rid of unused elements
• Making it simpler for newcomers to use the site.

Faster translation interface

The translation interface should now load faster. I optimised the page, reduced the amount of queries made to the database and greatly simplified the architecture under the hood.

You are now able to create your own custom locales, and some operations, such as editing a locale now perform instantly (instead of having to wait and lock the translation interface). This is a huge step forward.

Faster importers

I reworked the code used by the file importer. The improvements made to the importers increase the importing speed three folds. Importers now report the percentage done and the time estimate should be more accurate.

Keyboard shortcuts

This is a great new feature: keyboard shortcuts have been added to the translation interface. In fact, you can now navigate and work using only your keyboard. On the translation interface, press the h key or click on “Keyboard shortcuts available” to learn more about this feature.

Blog Post »

Discussions

You will notice a new “discussions” tab. The discussions page lists all comments made on your project’s strings. On this page you can also now start new discussions threads. This is a great place to discuss your project’s translations.

Blog Post »

New Dashboard and Project overview pages

The new dashboard and project pages load faster and give you a better overview about your projects.

Custom Locales

You can now create custom locales for a specific territory or use-case (you will be able to create locales such as en_GB_Singapore_Event or en_Pirate or anything you like).

Blog Post »

Web Translate It will be unavailable for a about an hour on Sunday, May 1st, 19:00 UTC as I will release an important update to the service. The total downtime shouldn’t exceed 1 hour.

This downtime was originally planned on April the 16th but was cancelled due to a few bugs and bottlenecks that needed to be fixed.

The downtime is needed to improve Web Translate It’s architecture in order to deliver new features, as well as improving the performance of the service.

On Sunday, May 1st, 19:00 UTC the service will be put in maintenance mode. The website won’t be accessible at all while we proceed to migrating the data hosted on Web Translate It to a new architecture. I estimate migrating the 6.3 million strings to the new architecture to take approximately 50 minutes.

This upgrade will bring a lot of enhancements and new features, which will be unveiled later.

Thank you for your patience as we refine Web Translate It’s architecture.

As always, you should follow @webtranslateit on Twitter for live updates.

The Ruby i18n plugin used by Ruby on Rails supports using a zero pluralization option for all locales.

The zero pluralization option is useful because it allows to write segments like this one in English:

en:
  friendship:
    zero: "Nobody is your friend"
    one: "One person is your friend"
    other: "%{count} people are your friends"

“Nobody is your friend” reads much better than “0 people are your friends”, doesn’t it?

Web Translate It now allows you to use the zero pluralization option directly from the web interface.

Click on “Add zero rule” to add a new textarea for zero option.

Type a translation for the zero rule and that’s it! Your language files will be generated with the zero option whenever you use it.

One thing we often need when internationalizing software is translating country and language names. Translating this data manually is a pain, and a lot of work.

Many developers don’t know about CLDR, Unicode’s Common Locale Data Repository, which contains translation and information about pretty much everything a software could need. It contains translations for country names, language names, currencies, and many other things.

However, CLDR data is a bit difficult to consume in an app, because it is composed of large XML files containing a lot of different things.

Introducing locale_data

I just released locale_data, which was extracted out of Web Translate It.

locale_data is a collection of country and language names, translated into hundreds of languages, and stored into YAML files for easy consumption in apps. For instance, here’s the list of countries in German, or in Spanish.

The data itself comes from CLDR, and rake tasks are provided to update the translation files whenever a new version of CLDR comes out.

You can get locale_data for free on Github.