The WebTranslateIt Blog

i18n news and Product Updates about WebTranslateIt

Ruby on Rails plugin for Web Translate It

By Edouard on November 2, 2009

In an effort to make Web Translate It easier to integrate with your application I developed a Ruby on Rails plugin for Web Translate It.

What does it do?

It provides a rake task to fetch your translations

rake trans:fetch

You can also setup the plugin to “autofetch” your translations, the plugin will look for and fetch new translations for every page loaded on your site. This means a translator can translate a string on Web Translate It, reload a page on your website and see instantly the translation she made in context.

How do I get and install it?

Please refer to the documentation on github.

For more help with regards to Web Translate It integration, please have a look at the integration help section on Web Translate It.

Which other web frameworks will you support?

I plan to create plugins for the popular frameworks Django and Cake PHP.

I hope you will find this plugin useful. Should you notice any issue or have a feature request for this plugin, please open an issue on Github’s issue tracking system.

Web Translate It Update: Better File Manager

By Edouard on October 29, 2009

I just rolled out an update to Web Translate It. The update fixes a couple of bugs with the plural forms, and better the File Manager and the importers.

What’s new in the File Manager?

Your list of files is now easier to use. On the File Manager home page you will see a list of Master language file, that is, the files in the language you want to translate from.

If you click on “View Translations”, you will see the target files, that is, the language files you want to translate to.

On this page, you can now rename the files. This is useful to map your Web Translate It projects to your project’s language file architecture. For example, some projects are organised this way:

o locales
  o en
    - locale.po
    - another_file.po
  o fr
    - locale.po
    - another_file.po

Now you can name your English file “en/locale.po” or your French file “fr/locale.po”. Web Translate It is clever enough to recognise you need subdirectories to organise your files and will create it for you when you download your project in a zip file.

The last improvement is support for language file headers. If you import a language file that contains some copyright or important information, Web Translate It will save it and will export your language files with that header.

You can as well edit the headers in Web Translate It’s interface, like so:

I hope this new addition helps you manage your files better in Web Translate It!

Product update: Web Translate now has an activity feed, better comments, charts and a better search

By Edouard on October 24, 2009

Thanks for everyone who gave Web Translate It a try and for the kind words, in your different, beautiful languages.

Since the opening to the public last week I have been hard at work. I improved some existing features and added a few new features. Let’s have a look on what is new.

Improved comments

Comments are now slightly more sociable.

For example, let’s pretend I am a translator and I have a question about the context of a string to a developer.

So let’s write a comment. The new feature here is that I can mark comments as “annoucements”, “questions” and “answers”. Let’s mark it as a question.

The questions not yet answered are displayed on the project home page until they are answered, like so.

If anyone has an answer to a question, she can mark the comment as an “answer” and the topic will be marked as answered.

Comments are now a very efficient way to communicate within the team. Besides, any comment you write are imported/exported with the language files.

Improved project page

There are many improvements on this page. The biggest new feature is that it integrates an activity feed.

You can see at a glance what has been done in your project lately.

That’s not all. The raw project statistics have been replaced by charts.

All put together, it gives the following page.

The global, raw statistics from the old project page are gone to a new Language page.

Improved search

Search is better, too. You can now search for strings in a specific language.

Results are also more relevant. You can search through the translations, the key names and the developer comments, if available.

Minor bug fixes and improvements

Better blank slates

The blank slates (for example the project page for a newly created project) have been drastically improved.

Locale autocompletion

The long “locale select of doom” that was showing 300-ish locales in a drop-down had his time and has been replaced by a shiny field with auto complete. You can just type the beginning of the locale name or locale code (German or de_DE) and select it in the list. Much easier!

Better “people and languages” page

The “people and language” page was a page that allowed you to create new languages for your project, as well as inviting new users to your project.

All these important actions in one page wasn’t making it particularly easy to use, so I split it into two pages: the “Users” page and the “Languages” page.

I hope you will enjoy this new version of Web Translate It. If you have any remarks, questions and suggestion, please write a message on our support forum.

Web Translate It has launched!

By Edouard on October 14, 2009

Yes, you read it right: Web Translate It has launched.

What’s new?

A few bug fixes here, a few little features there, and few enhancements here again…. The biggest feature really is the payment system, so I can now welcome new customers.

Better import/export of strings

Look how slick the importer/exporter is now. It now has a nice progress bar and display how much time is left before completion. So now you know if you have the time to grab a cup of coffee or not.

Word counter

Another minor but essential improvement is the word counter. It counts for you how many words there is in a project.

Organisations pages

This part is completely new. This is where you manage your organisation (company or group), your billing information, the plan you choose, and so on. From there, you can change you plan, see at a glance how many strings you are using on your quota and park the projects you don’t use.

Try it!

Do you have a website or software to translate? Give it a try, you will get a 30-day trial so it won’t cost you a thing. If you don’t like it, just let the trial expire and we will delete your data.