The WebTranslateIt Blog

Formatting your comments on Web Translate It is now much easier with the markup editor.

If you have a look at your projects on Web Translate It, you will notice a new tiny icon.

Click on it and it will pop up and new window: the term base.

The term base (stands for terminology database) is a glossary of terms you can build collaboratively.

Consistency is important throughout your project, so you better find the best translations and stick to them. Is it sign in, signin, sign-in, sign me in, login, log in, log-in, log me in? The term base will help you to collaboratively decide which term you should use.

After you add a few terms, you will get a proper glossary:

You can search very quickly for terms in the glossary:

The suggestion system is the core feature of the term base. You can collaboratively work the translation suggestions until you find the perfect one. Only accepted suggestions will become the official ones.

I hope you will find this new feature useful. I am eager to hear from you by e-mail or on the forum if you have any suggestions or feedback to share.

A few months ago I introduced my week-end project: the language and territory database which was exposing the data used by Web Translate It to build its locales and handle plural forms.

It contains information about:

• In which territories a language is spoken
• Which languages are spoken on a given territory
• And other information about the language, such as the plural rules form.

Now you know what looks really bad on a localised software? This:

This is actually a common problem software developers have when localising software exposing this kind of data. Should it be a billing address, the user’s current location or stats by countries countries, developers need to localise it.

Maybe I haven’t looked hard enough (in which case, please point me out a database) but I haven’t found any open-source database of localised countries and languages, so this work is repeated over and over. There are about 250 territories and 500 languages to localise into 500 languages, so that’s a lot of work.

I actually need this localised data myself, and Web Translate It is a translation tool after all, so I thought I should make this data translatable and available to the public. Once for all.

So go and help me translate these databases! If you don’t have a user account, you can sign up for free.

• Territory database
• Languages database

Wait, what will you do with this data?

When I will have enough data (at least the territories translated into 10 languages) I will release monthly a SQL data dump on Github, under the MIT license, so developers can use it directly in their apps.

What else could need translation?

All the major cities in the world! “London” is “Londres” in French, and “Brussels” is “Bruxelles”. Wouldn’t that be cool if we had a database of localised cities?

So I also started building a City database you can already help translate, too, although it is still in a early stage.

All of this geographical data (territories, cities) come with geolocation (longitude and latitude), amount of population, and some other extra information, so you can build cool stuff on top of it.

Come and help if you have a little bit of time (and especially if you need this data!)

I just pushed a new release to Web Translate It, which includes a few bug fixes, as well as a new API endpoint to serve the project’s statistics.

You can find all the information you need in the API documentation.

Web Translate It’s ruby client has been updated to 1.5.1 to include a new command to fetch your project’s statistics: wti stats.

Today someone asked me if Web Translate It support bidi scripts.

What are bidi scripts?

Bi-directionnal scripts is text containing text in both directionalities, that is to say both right-to-left (RTL) and left-to-right (LTR). This is fairly frequent, for example Arab text containing English brand names.

Web Translate It support LTR, RTL and bi-directionnal text in its web interface. More precisely, Web Translate It automatically select the correct text directionality based on the language and script you choose.

Bi-directionnality is a web-browser feature. It works fine with Firefox 3.5, Google Chrome and Safari 4.

Thank you for using Web Translate It!