The WebTranslateIt Blog · Page 57

Yesterday I launched a brand new feature to Web Translate It: a translation memory.

It is very easy to use. To see it in action, watch this introductory video.

Introducing Web Translate It’s translation memory from Édouard Brière on Vimeo.

(view this video in HD at Vimeo)

Where do the translations come from?

So far, translations come from 3 sources:

• Google Translate provides machine translations. It provides a result most of the time, but translation can be incorrect for the context of the string, or contain some spelling mistakes.
• If your project is already partially translated, you will get suggestions from your own project. This is great because it helps you translate with consistency.
• Finally, some suggestions come from the global translation memory. The global translation memory is a large translation memory made of more than a million software translations. If you want to, your can contribute your project’s translations to this memory and help other projects like yours. You can set these options in your project settings.

The suggestions are often good but still not perfect yet. They will get better the more translations you add, and I will enhance the suggestion algorithm throughout this week.

In the meanwhile, I hope you’ll appreciate this feature, which drastically change the way you translate on Web Translate It!

I released the version 1.6.2 of the Web Translate It gem today. It is merely a bug fixes release. Here are the changes:

• Compatibility with Ruby 1.9,
• Ability to run the rake tasks when installed as a Rails plugin,
• Fix a few crashes occurring when accessing a non-configured project.

What is the Web Translate It client?

The Web Translate It client is an open-source tool programmed in Ruby. It helps you sync your project’s language files with Web Translate It, and it’s a real life saver for projects with dozen of language files.

After installing the gem, it provides:

• An executable, wti, that you can use to help sync any kind of projects (not only ruby projects), so long you have the ruby language installed (ruby is installed on most linux and Mac OS distributions nowadays). From your project directory, you can do wti push to send us your master language files, and wti pull to get your translated files.
• A set of rake tasks and libraries you can build on top of. For example you can easily set it up to automatically update your language files as you request pages on your project.

To get it, follow the installation instructions on the Web Translate It page on Github.

The File Manager in Web Translate It just got a bit more clever.

Since the last update, you need to setup the full path for each language file in order to map the files with the files used by the web_translate_it gem.

It means you basically had to manually edit each file name and change its name.

Cumbersome if you have 40 languages and 10 files! No longer. You can now edit all the file names at once. Click on the master language file.

A box will pop up and will propose help you rename the file.

Tick the “Rename target files as well?” box, save and voilà!

I hope you will find this small update useful, thank you for using Web Translate It.

A few changes have been made to the API and to the ruby client. Changes on the API are backwards compatible, so it won’t affect any projects. However you will need to make a very tiny change to your projects if you upgrade the client from the current version (1.5.2) to the next version (1.6). If you don’t use the Web Translate It client, no action is necessary.

Changes to the API

Until today, calls to the File API to download or upload a file were using the id of the “master language file”, even to access a target file.

For example, for the project Web Translate It, in which the source language is English and the target language French, calls had to be like so:

English: webtranslateit.com/api/projects/…/files/1941/locales/en

French: webtranslateit.com/api/projects/…/files/1941/locales/fr

From now on, you can also fetch the target language files by using the target language file ID, which gives:

English: webtranslateit.com/api/projects/…/files/1941/locales/en

French:

webtranslateit.com/api/projects/…/files/1942/locales/fr

It makes things easier when programming tools with the API. This change is backwards compatible, so it won’t affect the current client or any tool you developed.

Upcoming changes to the client

You currently have to setup a configuration file which looks like so:

api_key: 'sekret'
ignore_locales: :en

# A list of files to translate
files:
  1941: app/[locale].yml
  1943: defaults/[locale].yml

There are several problems with this approach.

• it is a bit complicated to set up and requires the user to configure the project at two different places: on Web Translate It and on your project itself.
• it makes too many assumptions. For example, it assumes that you want to have a file named pt_BR.yml for brazilian portuguese, although maybe you’d rather use pt-BR.yml. Also, sometimes the file extension changes depending of the language. For example you might want to have en.pot and de.po files.

To fix these issues, the upcoming version 1.6 will take another approach. All the configuration will take place in the File Manager, in which you will to set up the complete relative path of your language files. Your configuration file will now be much simpler:

api_key: 'sekret'

The File Manager will have to have the complete file paths like so:

The upcoming version of the client will be released early this week. Thank you for using Web Translate It.

You can now upload and attach files to your comments on Web Translate It.

When you are typing a comment, click on “Upload File” and select a file. You can then type a comment (or leave the comment empty), then save it and the files will be automatically attached to the comment.

There is no limit: you can attach as many files as you want to a comment. You can attach anything: pictures (they will be resized), pdf files, zip files, anything.

Once your comment is saved, attachments will be sorted by file types and displayed underneath your comment. Click the cropped images to view them full size.

Since I was dealing with file uploads, I also added the ability to upload an avatar in your settings.

I hope you will find these improvements useful. Thank your for using Web Translate It.