The WebTranslateIt Blog · Page 3

Every now and then, we like to talk about the great projects that are being supported by WebTranslateIt. Gibberfish is one of them.

Gibberfish, Inc. was founded by Simon Spartalian, Raymond Lalumiere, Brian O'Donnell and Rob Rickner. All of them wished to support non-profit organizations, activists and human rights defenders worldwide by providing them with accessible encryption.

We asked Brian O'Donnell, Executive Director, to tell us more about it.

WTI: What exactly is Gibberfish?
B.O.D.: We are an all-volunteer non-profit that provides a secure, private cloud collaboration platform. For qualifying groups we provide zero-knowledge hosting free of charge. Our software is 100% free and open source, so anyone who wishes can also download and run it themselves. In either case, the cost is always $0.

WTI: Who are the people who started it and what was your main motivation?
B.O.D.: Our founders are a group of friends with a diverse set of skills. We are united by our belief that privacy is central to protecting free speech, individual liberties and civil rights.

The initial impetus for our project came from the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in Standing Rock, South Dakota in 2016. A lot of groups that participated in those protests communicated using platforms like Google Docs or Facebook. These platforms have a notoriously bad track record when it comes to privacy. There is ample evidence of peaceful protesters being attacked and harassed by authorities tracking them via their cell phones and Facebook posts. This surveillance was magnified by private companies who make it their business to know—and sell—our personal information. In this environment it became clear to us that activists need online tools that can’t be weaponized against them.

We took a look at what already existed, and it fell into one of three broad categories:
- ‘Free’ but questionably private (Facebook, Google, et al)
- Paid, with robust privacy protections (e.g. SpiderOak)
- Do-it-yourself solutions (ownCloud, Nextcloud, etc)

For small groups with limited funds the ‘free’ option is often the only choice, and it’s arguably the worst one. Unfortunately, a group on a shoestring budget can’t afford the fees charged by paid services. Both ‘free’ and paid services can also respond to requests or demands for your information without your knowledge or consent. DIY solutions have many great advantages. Most importantly they return complete control over your data to the user. But while they can be reasonably affordable, they require a high level of technical skill.

We decided that we could take an existing DIY alternative, namely Nextcloud, and remove all of the technical and financial hurdles to provide something with the same quality and usability of the major online platforms while making privacy and security paramount.

WTI: How is Gibberfish maintained and developed? Do you rely only on volunteers?
B.O.D.: Gibberfish is composed of two main software projects, both of which are open-source under the MIT License. The first, Pancrypticon, is an automation of the Nextcloud stack using Docker. Each service runs in its own container and they are all tightly integrated to work together seamlessly. We can upgrade, modify, or replace any component easily. From the user’s perspective, their cloud just works.

Our second project, Daygate, is a web application written in Django. Daygate serves as the management portal we provide to our hosted clients. It allows them to deploy their cloud server with a single click, and intuitively self-manage SSH keys and backups.

Both projects are public on Gitlab.com and we gladly accept and encourage community contributions. We continue to expand system availability and enhance user experience.

WTI: Can you tell us how WebTranslateIt is helping you along the way?
B.O.D.: Accessibility is really important to us. We want our project to be accessible and approachable to everyone, worldwide. Since we’ve already removed technical and financial barriers from our service, it’s natural to eliminate language barriers as well. We’re all primary English speakers, so having translators is invaluable.

We put out a call for volunteers and got a great response, but it quickly became difficult to manage a dozen or so translators by swapping files over email. When we found out about WebTranslateIt (via a post on Diaspora*) we were excited. Now it’s very easy to direct volunteers to our project, see their progress, and let them know when we need corrections or updates. In the past we manually transcribed translator’s work into our codebase. Now we can pull in changes automatically using a simple script.

We need to make every dollar count, so the free service for non-profits enables us to succeed.

WTI: Gibberfish is already available in 13 languages, do you have more coming and how could people help out with the translation?
B.O.D.: Our initial focus in recruitment was to cover the most commonly used languages online first. We were able to have the top ten languages fully translated, although we still need help keeping our information up to date.

Anyone who is interested in helping us translate our materials from English to another language can request an invitation to one of our WebTranslateIt projects directly:
- the translation project of our Management Portal
- or that of our User Documentation.

WTI: How do you finance the project?
B.O.D.: Our organization is volunteer driven, and we rely on donations to fund our activities. All of the members of the team work for free, and we use free open-source software. There are still significant costs associated with hosting servers for our clients, as well as overhead from registration fees, and other online services. In our first year we all invested our own money in the project. Now that we’re fully operational and taking on real costs, it’s more important than ever to get public support.

We’re a registered, tax-exempt 501©(3) organization, so all contributions by US taxpayers are fully deductible. Regardless, 100% of your donation will go to directly support privacy and liberty worldwide.

If you wish to help out, don’t hesitate to donate.

WTI: How many users do you have and what kind of feedback do you get from them?
B.O.D.: We’re somewhat fanatical about our clients’ privacy, so we don’t say much about them individually or as a class. By design, Gibberfish severely limits what is even possible to know about a user. We can say that they have been grateful to have our service available in languages they understand.
If Webtranslateit users know a group that could benefit from Gibberfish we would love to hear from them. For everyone’s safety and security, please do not send us names or contact information for anyone. We cannot reach out. Interested groups must contact us through an encrypted channel. One is available on our website.

WTI: Do you intend on creating a version that could be commercialised and sold for instance to companies relying a lot on R&D to help you keep supplying the tool for free to non-profit organizations?
B.O.D.: We started this with the goal of providing a free service to people in need, and we have no plans to do otherwise.

WTI: Are there any features your team is working on right now and for which you need help in priority?
B.O.D.: Development of our Management Portal has priority right now. Currently it allows our clients to self-deploy their apps, manage backups and upload SSH keys. We would like to further improve these features, as well as add new ones with the goal of giving as much autonomy and control as possible to the client. Volunteers who have experience with Django, python in general, and Javascript would all be very valuable. Additionally, we have some tweaks and features we would like to see in Nextcloud, so we could also use the help of PHP programmers who could develop these features for us and submit them to the upstream Nextcloud codebase.

However we don’t just need programmers! People who can help us share the responsibility of website maintenance, blogging, social media presence, fundraising, etc are all welcome, and we encourage them to contact us. We’re a small group that wears a lot of hats, so there’s plently of work to go around for volunteers with nearly any skillset.


Do you wish to get involved?
Contact the Gibberfish team via email at info@gibberfish.org or via their encrypted contact form.

Are you a developer and want to help out? Go directly to Gibberfish’s Gitlab page.
If you wish to help out financially, don’t hesitate to donate.


Are you a non-profit organization in need of translating a project on a budget? Don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll help out.


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Hi folks,

On May 25, new data privacy laws called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) take effect in the European Union. These laws provide consumers with more control over their personal data.

We agree with the idea of the GDPR for a safe and secure Internet. In fact, ever since the beginning of WebTranslateIt in 2009 we’ve always been collecting the least information possible about our users.
Regarding the personal data we do collect, we are committed to your right to privacy and to being transparent about how and why we store your data.

Here are the specifics of what we’ve done to comply with GDPR.

Privacy Policy

We’ve added a new Privacy Policy page. This page clarifies the types of information we collect, why we collect it, and how long data is stored.

Basically, we only collect your e-mail address and password, and if you choose to do so, an image and your name. The only caveat is that your name and image will be displayed on the people’s page of the projects you contribute to for other team members to see. Also your e-mail address will be visible to project managers on that page (so that they can contact you).

If you are a customer, we also collect your organization address, billing e-mail address, payment details, bank country, VAT number or Tax Identification number as we are legally required to do so.

Cookies

We added a cookie notice to all marketing pages. We do not use any analytics software and only use cookies for technical reasons.

Deletion

We have always allowed users to delete their user accounts by themselves. As usual, you can do this in your settings. When a user deletes their user account, all the work they contributed to (comments, translations) are anonymized (eg. “a deleted user translated this segment”).

Modification

Users can change their information stored on WebTranslateIt in their settings at any time.

Access and Portability

A user can request access to a copy of the personal data that we have collected. Users who wish to request portability can reach out to us at any time. As we work with language files, the easiest way for you is just to download your language files to import it to another tool compatible with your language files.

Updates to the website regarding privacy

We were previously running analytics on the blog and marketing pages and we are no longer doing that.

We were using Twitter and Facebook buttons on some pages of the website, and we replaced them with static buttons generated with the awesome SharingButtons.io.

List of sub-processors

As WebTranslateIt is a data processor, we are required to maintain a list of our sub-processors.

Data Protection Addendum

We’ve created a legal agreement that business users can request, promising the protection of all personally identifiable information and sensitive information that we collect and store. You can download this document here.

For more information about our privacy policies, please head over to our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Security Policy pages.

Thank you so much for reading. Should you have any questions about our GDPR compliance, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Hi there!

Spring is here (or is it? it doesn’t feel like it yet) and while most people in Málaga (where we’re based) were busy preparing everything for Semana Santa, we’ve been busy bees working on new features and bug fixes. Here are a few of these features and changes that we released recently.

Custom Locales for Teams

Do you use Custom Locales? Do you use Teams?

Then you will like this update, because you can now create teams of translators working on custom locales.

It all starts when inviting a new translator or language coordinator:

Set the custom locale in Teams and that’s it!

As usual, if you don’t already have this language in your project you will be invited to create a new project language which will be custom made as well.

WebHooks and logs on status changes

WebHooks are now fired and activity feed now logs all activity happening on translations, down to a single status change. It was previously fired and logged only if the text was changed. It is now easier to see what is happening in your project.

wti rubygem v.2.4.7 released

This minor version includes a fix for our SSL certificate and an option to deactivate SSL verification warnings. In your .wti file, add the line:

silence_errors: true

Move to Spain, Tax ID, VAT numbers, new invoices, …

WebTranslateIt.com is now a Spanish company. the months of February and March were also dedicated to preparing that move. As a result, you might have noticed that we send new invoices. Also, as we need to Know Our Customers™ better, we ask our customers more information, such as their billing address, Tax Number, VAT number (if they are a company based in the EU).

Estelle must have gotten in touch with you but if she hasn’t already, you can update your organization information on this page: https://webtranslateit.com/en/organizations/1-atelier-convivialite/edit

I hope you will like all these changes. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us if you have any questions, feedback or feature requests!

And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Today we are featuring another great project being translated on WebTranslateIt.com: NuMundo’s growing network of impact centers, connecting individuals around the world to places where they can live transformational experiences and learn the many different ways to lead a peaceful and eco-friendly life.

But what exactly is an impact center? It is a land based project that offers individual transformation, regenerative living education and strives to leave a positive local impact. An impact center could be an ecovillage, organic farm, yoga retreat center, or even a hostel.
Through their own exploration, NuMundo’s founders have found thousands of hubs globally that are examples of sustainable and holistic living, producing practical, low-cost solutions to the global climate crisis. These hubs incorporate ideals like community living, whole systems design, appropriate technology, seed banking, holistic health, and regenerative enterprise. Through NuNumdo’s platform, these impact centers are becoming more accessible to the world and easily share crucial information and resources.

Sara Johnstone, NuMundo Chief Operating Officer, tells us more about this great enterprise.

WTI: Who were the people who started NuMundo and what was their main motivation?
S.J.: NuMundo’s founders wanted to connect people to impact centers around the globe. As world travellers who came together in intentional communities in Central America, they realized they were all relying on word of mouth to find alternative destinations, most of which were not on any search engines or travel sites. They shared a vision of a decentralized digital network that would empower travellers to discover paradisiacal, “off the grid” locations. And so NuMundo was born.

PLURITY - Project Nuevo Mundo's Earth Odyssey - Vision I from NuMundo on Vimeo.

WTI: I’ve read all of the main participants still have jobs on the side, does it mean the platform was entirely created by volunteers? How many people are now working on it or volunteering and how do you finance the project?
S.J.: NuMundo has been co-created by dozens of committed, passionate, values-aligned contributors. Some of those who have contributed for a year or more have earned equity in the project.
We currently have three people working full-time, and another ten part-time.

NuMundo team gathering. Time offline (“AFK - away from keyboard”) is just as important as time online.

To finance our vision, we have been mostly bootstrapped, crowdfunded with Indiegogo, received a small angel investment, a grant from the Chilean government’s Startup Chile accelerator program and driven revenue through platform bookings and event production.

In addition, over fifty NuMundo “ambassadors” play central roles in expanding and nurturing our global community.

NuMundo ambassadors play a critical role in the NuMundo network.

WTI: You have more than 390 centers registered, is this number growing and what process do the centers have to go through to get registered?
S.J.: NuMundo is growing organically at about two to four centers a week with little active effort to expand our database. At present, we have passed the 400 mark! Aspiring impact centers must fill out a profile and submit to publish on our platform, at which point one of our team members reviews the profile and makes sure it’s a fit. If so, they join our network.

NuMundo team practicing yoga at our Costa Rica NuBase, Finca Morpho.

WTI: Is the activity on your platform increasing? If so, why do you think a growing number of people seems to be seeking this kind of experience?
S.J.: Yes. We believe more and more people are seeking passion, purpose, and fulfillment in life and work. In our disconnected modern world, survivors of unsustainable urban lifestyles are increasingly striving to live in alignment with natural cycles—eating healthy, organic food, embracing conscious practices for mental and physical well-being, developing at the personal and professional level, reconnecting with nature, spending meaningful time on self-discovery in supportive co-living environments, and cultivating community.

NuMundo team members practicing acro-yoga.

WTI: If I were interested in spending time in one of NuMundo’s impact centers how should I proceed?
S.J.: If you’re interested in spending time at an impact center, you can check our network here and see our experiences here. Some of our centers offer work trade options or paid stays, which can be booked directly through the site. We also have many centers that you must contact directly to arrange your visit.

Numundo center Rancho Mastatal’s bamboo house Tiburon.

WTI: The NuMundo platform has already been translated from English to Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese, may I ask why these languages in particular? And do you intend to have it translated into other languages and can you tell us how WebTranslateIt has helped you along the way?
S.J.: Our platform was created in Central America. This is where our founders were living and where they first connected with each other. This is where our network is the strongest, and so translating into Spanish was a priority. Our CTO is from Portugal, and we have a partnership with a Japanese intentional community network.
We’re planning to integrate French and German at some point, as we grow our presence in Europe and elsewhere in the world. Using WebTranslateit for translations has been a great experience, and the tool has all the features we’ve needed so far. Especially when translating to Japanese, as we could lead discussions with the local team of translators directly in each segment, making it easy to find clarity and successfully complete complex translations. We’ve also had good experiences with onboarding translators, who have had no problems using the interface, giving us good feedback about the process and their user experience using the dashboard.

WTI: What is the next step for NuMundo?
S.J.: It is our dream to sustainably work full-time on this platform! This is why we’re exploring ways to monetize the platform through memberships, booking fees, marketing services and event production. As an organization, we are dedicated to growing the new regenerative culture and revolutionize value creation. We are passionate about building new decentralized economic and social systems.
Most recently, this has meant utilizing blockchain technology in the development of our own cryptocurrency token, NuCoin. In our pursuit of financial sustainability and ecological lifestyle, we’re always seeking that perfect synergy between revenue generation and integrity. No matter what challenges we face, we are dedicated first and foremost to our mission.


If you want to help out NuMundo in their inspiring adventure don’t hesitate to Get Involved.


And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Hi there,

We released a small new feature on WebTranslateIt today: the ability to sort files in the File Manager.

By default files are listed by file name, now you can also filter by size (which is basically sorting out by the amount of segments in a file) or by the date the file was last updated, which is useful to detect stale files in very large projects with many files.

Each of these sorting options can be listed in ascending or descending order.

I hope you will find this improvement useful. Thank you for using WebTranslateIt!


And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

We just released an update to WebTranslateIt so you can now disable suggestions. You can do this at a project-level or user-level.

As manager: disable translation suggestions for all translators on a project

As a manager, sometimes you want to control if your translators can reuse translations from other projects, or if they should translate everything from scratch.

You can now choose if translators should receive suggestions in the project settings.

As a user: disable your own suggestions

You can now simply disable suggestions in the toolbar at the bottom of the screen. Select “Disable Suggestions”.

I hope you will find this new feature useful. Thank you for using WebTranslateIt.


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Jan Hinrichs, Founder and CEO at Beluga Linguistics

WTI: What gave you interest in the translation business and for how long have you been running a translation agency?
J.H.: I came to translation through my work at XING, a company my brother founded back in 2004. I helped him to translate the website into Spanish first and in the two following years I was actively involved in the management of the translation process into another 15 languages and as a country manager for Spain. In 2006, in agreement with XING’s management, my wife and I founded Beluga after realising that we could run the translation part better as a standalone company.

WTI: Can you tell us what kind of companies your are mainly working with?
J.H.: With XING as our first client we moved ahead and were lucky enough to get in touch over the years with companies like Last.fm, Moo, Bebo, Lookout, Swatch, MyTaxi, Tinder, Adroll and other high profile companies from tech and global brands. Our experience in setting up and running translation teams for fast moving companies has been a perfect match for businesses with ongoing translation needs for their digital content.

WTI: You are specialized in software translation. Which kind of software are you mainly working on?
J.H.: Apps, websites, blogs, dashboards, help center, emails, support content, etc.

WTI: You are our oldest customer, when did you start thinking about using an online localization tool?
J.H.: Online translation tools have been key for companies with ongoing translation workflows ever since SaaS was invented. Social networks spearheaded this development.
At XING we had built up a homegrown editor which helped us to scale easily and run daily updates. When we on-boarded new clients later on, we found ourselves building up editors with our clients internal staff again and again. It was very time consuming and the success depended heavily on the resources our clients were able/willing to dedicate to the process. It was time to get an independent third party tool in the middle.
We briefly launched an open source editor called FIT but this project unfortunately died because of lack of volunteers. 
Through Last.fm - which was our third client back in 2006 and who’ve been trusting us for more than a decade with their localization process - we got to know Edouard, who at the time worked at Last.fm and helped us get the editor working there. When we pitched him to join the project he came up with a better idea: WebTranslateIt! We were lucky enough to be the first ones to benefit from his unique skills and could roll out many projects through this platform.

WTI: How did WTI improve the translation process for you?
J.H.: The support and responsiveness of the WTI team has been just great and has allowed us to solve obstacles in our projects within no time. We can easily set up projects for our clients without any technical personnel involved. When technical knowhow is needed and we can’t help any more the WTI team is always there to solve potential issues.

WTI: How exactly do you use WTI? Do you centralize all of the projects of your customers? Or do you have them open their own account and then handle the translation process for them through their account?
J.H.: We usually help our clients to open their own accounts and onboard ourselves as managers within their account to help them with the setting up. While they connect via api with their repositories we manage the human part of the process.

WTI: What kind of feedback do your translators give you about WTI?
J.H.: WTI is one of those editors that is easy to use, stable and that gives translators most of the things they need. Something what we do miss a bit at WTI is a segmentation on a sentence level to process fuzzy matches better. Currently there are only suggestions but the stats do not bear them in mind.

WTI: And we will certainly be working on that. Because of the way we communicate on diverse media and platforms, the content that must be localized is always evolving and needs to be turned around rapidly, do you have a lot of customers using WTI to provide continuous delivery in localization and what do they think of the process?
J.H.: 90% of our projects are ongoing projects that require a platform like WTI and thanks to the synchronisation tool the process is pretty smooth.

WTI: A growing trend to meet the challenges of the localization of constantly evolving content is machine translation post-editing (MTPE), our platform allows its use as well. Do you rely a lot on MTPE or do you prefer to have translators issue a first translation before proofreading?
J.H.: Machine translation has made a major step forward a year ago when Google launched their Neural Machine Translation (NMT) engine. We have seen a big jump in quality. We can’t use MT for everything but it is already a great help to speed up translation work. We usually enable MT results to be shown in the suggestions from WTI. The translators can then decide if they want to use them or not. Paired with adaptive NMT translators get more productive and can do more in less time.
It is important to understand as well that MT can help translate content that couldn’t be translated by human translators because of time or cost constraints (Microsoft or the EU have been working with MT for years because of the vast amounts of content they need to publish). Today Neural Machine Translation engines do offer in certain contexts very good results a human only need to edit slightly. I believe that in near future many initial translations will mostly be done by NMT and human translators will concentrate on post editing and higher level translations with more impact.

Do you need professional help translating your website, software or app? Or simply want to stay tuned to Jan’s outlook on translation and localization? Follow him on: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Medium.


And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

WebTranslateIt has hundreds of customers and amongst them, some very innovative companies – diagnose.me is one of them.

Diagnose.me is a Dutch company founded in 2013 by Ivan Stefunko and Lukas Alner after they both realized how difficult it was to access expert medical opinions when facing serious health issues.
They wanted to help people facing the same ordeal – also people who’ve been given different diagnoses and don’t know which one to trust, people who want a second opinion – but can’t bear to go to yet another hospital or just can’t because the next best specialist is too far away.
Diagnose.me gives the possibility to consult your diagnosis with top doctors and multidisciplinary teams. You can select the doctor, hospital or the team specialized in your problem, send them the information they need and you’ll receive a comprehensive report within 3-5 days.

In order to be able to give the possibility to consult with the best specialists to as many people as possible, it just seemed natural that the website should be translated in several languages.
The technical team of diagnose.me has been using WebTranslateIt to localize their website since February 2017 and it is already available in 5 languages – and more to come!

We asked Miro Skovajsa, COO/CFO of Diagnose.me to tell us about the translation process.

WTI: Can you tell us why you chose WTI?
M.S.: We chose WebTranslateIt because it had all the features we were looking for. We did quite an extensive search because we are quite a small team and needed to get it right the first time. Specifically, we were looking for an easily extensible localization tool as we are growing fast. Also integration had to be simple.
Our crucial features were web interface and easy workflow for our translators. They needed to be able to very quickly find what keys are new and need to be translated and what keys have changed in the source language and need to be verified.

WTI: How did you work on localization before?
M.S.: Text files, it was a nightmare!

WTI: How did WebTranslateIt improve the translation process for you, which tasks did it make easier?
M.S.: Everything, but especially managing the workflow.

WTI: What is your favorite feature in WebTranslateIt?
M.S.: That translated keys are marked as “to verify” in each language whenever the source changes.

WTI: Is there a feature that you think is lacking on WebTranslateIt?
M.S.: Yes, support for keys that are specific to a language. For example a key that needs to be translated only to one language - right now it shows up in all languages and we have have to flag it as “do not translate”.

We were happy to tell Miro that this particular feature is already in the works! So to all of you faced with the same issue, just stay tuned, we’ll release it soon.
In the meantime, we’ll keep working with diagnose.me to help them reach out to worldwide patients.


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Every now and then, we like to talk about the great projects that are being supported by WebTranslateIt. Diaspora* is one of them.

Diaspora* was founded in 2010 by Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy.
They met at New York University’s Courant Institute and decided to create Facebook’s non-profit ethical competitor: a federated social network where decentralization, privacy and freedom are top priorities.

It was such a bold initiative that they got the attention of the media and even the New York Times wrote about them in an article entitled Four Nerds and A Cry to Arms Against Facebook.
Diaspora* has been around for 7 years now and is not ready to let go.

We asked Dennis Schubert, Project Manager, to tell us more about it.

WTI: Who are the people behind diaspora* and what was their main motivation?
D.S.: The project was founded by Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy back in 2010. Back then, we basically only had Facebook and Twitter, both are centralized systems. Distributed systems have a lot of advantages, especially for social networks when it comes to topics like privacy or availability.
And since August 2012, diaspora* is completely managed and developed by a community team.

WTI: How is diaspora* maintained and developed?
D.S.: Diaspora* is based on a Ruby on Rails backend with a JavaScript heavy frontend and we currently have a team of 10-15 active code contributors. In total, 490 people contributed to the project on GitHub.
In addition, we use WebTranslateIt to translate both diaspora* and our website into 93 languages with the help of more than 600 volunteers.

WTI: How do you finance the project?
D.S.: We kinda… don’t. Technically, we do not collect money for the project itself since we do not have fixed expenses. However, we do use bountysource.com to allow people to put bounties on individual issues.
When someone wants to work on an issue, they can simply submit a pull request and when that’s done, they’ll get the bounty on that issue paid out.
Some contributors pick issues because of the bounties, however, some simply pick issues they deemed interesting.
In addition, bountysource.com allows people to donate money, which allows the maintainer team to put bounties on issues. We pick the issues based on user demand and by value to the project.

WTI: How many users do you have?
D.S.: Hard to say! We collect optional usage statistics on the-federation.info, which would bring us to 651.328 users right now.
However, publishing the statistics is entirely optional, so we cannot say how much users we actually have!

WTI: Are there any features your team is working on right now and for which you need help in priority?
D.S.: Well there are a lot of important issues, but most of them are not very
contributor-friendly. At bountysource, there is a list of issues with the highest bounties, so that’s what users feel is important. A guide on how to pick stuff to work on is written in our Get involved section and linked documents.

If you want to help out diaspora*, you know where to start :

Are you a non-profit organization in need of translating a project on a budget? Don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll help out.

Want more? Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Today we released another of our most requested features. As many of you know, it is possible to receive e-mail notifications about new segments to translate.

If you don’t know about it, it’s super easy to set up. Go to your project settings and look for “Events » Check for new segments to work on”, select a frequency (daily or hourly) and who to notify.

Until today this feature was only sending e-mail notifications about new segments being added to a project. But what about segments needing proofreading or verification?

From now on, we will now send e-mails about segments being modified and needing to be worked on like for instance new segments to proofread or new segments to verify.

Hi,

There has been some changes in the project WebTranslateIt. Here’s what needs to be done:

In French:

• 1 segment to translate: https://webtranslateit.com/projects/406-webtranslateit/locales/en..fr/strings?created_at=2017-09-22@10:27:04..2017-09-22@13:27:04
• 3 segments to proofread: https://webtranslateit.com/projects/406-webtranslateit/locales/en..fr/strings?status=to_proofread&modification_date=2017-09-22@10:27:04..2017-09-22@13:27:04
• 3 segments to verify: https://webtranslateit.com/projects/406-webtranslateit/locales/en..fr/strings?status=to_verify&modification_date=2017-09-22@10:27:04..2017-09-22@13:27:04

---

Cheers,
– WebTranslateIt

Also, if you are a user having translation rights to multiple languages you will get a notification e-mail about the multiple languages.

Hi Edouard,

There has been some changes in the project WebTranslateIt. Here’s what needs to be done:

In German:

• 1 segment to translate: https://webtranslateit.com/projects/406-webtranslateit/locales/en..de/strings?created_at=2017-09-22@10:27:04..2017-09-22@13:27:04

---

In English:

• 1 segment to translate: https://webtranslateit.com/projects/406-webtranslateit/locales/en..en/strings?created_at=2017-09-22@10:27:04..2017-09-22@13:27:04
• 1 segment to proofread: https://webtranslateit.com/projects/406-webtranslateit/locales/en..en/strings?status=to_proofread&modification_date=2017-09-22@10:27:04..2017-09-22@13:27:04

---

In Spanish:

• 1 segment to translate: https://webtranslateit.com/projects/406-webtranslateit/locales/en..es/strings?created_at=2017-09-22@10:27:04..2017-09-22@13:27:04
• 1 segment to verify: https://webtranslateit.com/projects/406-webtranslateit/locales/en..es/strings?status=to_verify&modification_date=2017-09-22@10:27:04..2017-09-22@13:27:04

---

In French:

• 1 segment to translate: https://webtranslateit.com/projects/406-webtranslateit/locales/en..fr/strings?created_at=2017-09-22@10:27:04..2017-09-22@13:27:04
• 3 segments to proofread: https://webtranslateit.com/projects/406-webtranslateit/locales/en..fr/strings?status=to_proofread&modification_date=2017-09-22@10:27:04..2017-09-22@13:27:04
• 3 segments to verify: https://webtranslateit.com/projects/406-webtranslateit/locales/en..fr/strings?status=to_verify&modification_date=2017-09-22@10:27:04..2017-09-22@13:27:04

---

In Italian:

• 1 segment to translate: https://webtranslateit.com/projects/406-webtranslateit/locales/en..it/strings?created_at=2017-09-22@10:27:04..2017-09-22@13:27:04

---

In Russian:

• 1 segment to translate: https://webtranslateit.com/projects/406-webtranslateit/locales/en..ru/strings?created_at=2017-09-22@10:27:04..2017-09-22@13:27:04

---

In Swedish:

• 1 segment to translate: https://webtranslateit.com/projects/406-webtranslateit/locales/en..sv/strings?created_at=2017-09-22@10:27:04..2017-09-22@13:27:04

---

Cheers,
– WebTranslateIt

Note: We initially released this feature on the 25th of September but rolled it back due to our user’s feedback. We re-released it today with the ability to fine-tune what gets sent to our users. You can now control if you want your users to receive e-mails about new segments to translate, or about segments to proofread or to verify.

I hope you will find this improvement useful. Thank you for using WebTranslateIt.


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By Oliver Grimm, Technical Lead – European Resistance Archive

Oliver Grimm, Technical Lead – European Resistance Archive

The European Resistance Archive (ERA) is an online video archive featuring interviews with women and men who tell their individual stories of resistance to the terror, humiliation and despair fascism cast over Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Why ERA?

The idea for the ERA was born in 2005 in Reggio Emilia, northern Italy, where the local historical institute Istoreco integrated former partisans into their educational programs. The living participants met with school classes and youth groups to share their personal experiences; what happened to them in the second world war, how they encountered the rise of fascism, and their individual path into the resistance movements.

Unfortunately, the majority of former partisans have already died, and in a few years there will be no one remaining who can directly remember that time. Keeping these memories, this precious knowledge alive, making it accessible to everyone everywhere was and still is the motivation behind the European Resistance Archive.

Realization of the project

Istoreco managed to organize partners and groups in six European countries, and thus the project was accepted and funded by the European Commission in 2006. In the process of creating the ERA, young people participated actively in the realization of the project, in the form of conducting the interviews, collecting images and documents, writing down biographies, and transcribing interviews. Historians, memory workers, and a professional video-team guided the young participants in their work. Overall more than 80 people were involved.

The result is an online archive – a collection of 21 video interviews with contemporary eyewitnesses from Poland, France, Slovenia, Italy, Austria, and Germany. In addition, the archive provides an overview of each of these countries’ respective resistance movements, so as to better set the interviews in their proper historical context.

10 years later

A small internet agency in Kreuzberg (Berlin, Germany) was responsible for the technical production. At the time of its launch, in May 2007, the ERA was a state of the art project, but after almost ten years later it had become outmoded. Much of it was technically outdated and none of the video clips could be played on mobile phones or tablets.

The latter problem was a real show stopper, because mobile phones and tablets are what the majority of the target audience – pupils and young people – are using.
A complete technical revision of the ERA became inevitable and was started in mid 2017. The aim was to eliminate the technical issues, to modernize the design, and to adapt the display for different screen sizes.

Missing translations and WebTranslateIt

The ERA version 2.0 was launched in fall 2017. While the aforementioned issues have been solved, the archive has still only been fully translated into English, and the rest of the content is only partly available in other languages.
In order to get all of the content translated into all “ERA languages” a Github-based open source project was initiated, so that the effort could be crowd-sourced. This even got support from Babbel volunteers.

Unfortunately it turned out very quickly that that approach was too tech-heavy. Instead of working on the actual translations, most of the volunteers struggled with the technical terminology, the git flow and the principles of “pull requests”…

The solution best suited to this less than satisfactory situation was to switch to a professional translation tool. One of the candidates was WebTranslateIt, which Babbel uses to translate their platform and Apps. After a short evaluation period everyone involved voted for the switch.

WebTranslateIt did not hesitate to classify the ERA as open source project, which provides free access to all WTI features. As there is no proper funding for the ERA, WebTranslateIt’s support is highly appreciated.

What’s next? You!

While WebTranslateIt yielded a significant performance boost, there is still a lot of work to do, and a lot of content to be translated. Want to contribute to the ERA translation project ? Do you speak French, German, Italian, Polish, Slovenian, or English? Just go to http://www.resistance-archive.org/en/participate/ and sign up.

Are you a non-profit organization in need of translating a project on a budget? Don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll help out.


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Finding a simple visual cue that can be inserted on your front page to notify your users that your website is available in several languages is a tough problem to solve. Here are 4 classic ways to implement a language switcher, plus a lesser known way.

1. Just listing your languages

The most simple and effective way to let people switch language is to just list the languages you support. This is what Facebook does that and so do we. People expect this list to be in your footer, and the languages should be listed in their original, non-translated names. English for English, Français for French, Deutsch for German, etc.

Pros & Cons

On the upside, your users will eventually find a language that they know if it’s listed there.

The downside is that it takes up a lot of space in your design, so you might be temped to only use this on your landing page. Facebook trims it to the list of the most used languages and adds a “plus sign” to view all their supported languages.

2. A language dropdown menu

You can also insert a drop-down menu set by default on the current language, like English for instance. This is what Stripe does this for instance.

Pros & Cons

On the upside, it takes up less space in the footer compared to the previous solution.

The downside is that it lacks clarity for a user browsing the website in a language that he doesn’t know. As you can see on the image below I would get lost on the Chinese version of Stripe’s website 😅

This is where an icon helping foreign users identify the language switcher would come handy.

3. A language dropdown menu using country flags

Some multilingual websites who make the choice of using an icon often use a country flag which changes with your choice of language. This is how Slack does it for instance.

Pros & Cons

On the upside colorful flags attract attention. They also are universally known and people understand that they might be able to change some kind of regional setting here.

The downside is clear: country flags represent countries, not languages and some users won’t like it. Users visiting your website from the United Kingdom may not like to see the stars and stripes banner. Also, an American user might not like to see the Union Jack banner. Besides, English isn’t the only language spoken in UK. What about Welsh, Scottish, Gaelic? Basically, you may hurt people’s sensitivity.

4. A language dropdown menu using neutral icons

Designing an icon conveying the meaning of “Changing Language” is hard. Popular choices are icons of a globe, or a flag, or a globe in a flag, as Apple does.

Pictures of “exotic” characters such as 文 are popular too. This is what Google and Microsoft use in their user interfaces.

Pros & Cons

The upside is that while these icons are clearly visible, they won’t hurt anyone’s sensitivity.

The downside is that these icons aren’t unified across software vendors so it might be difficult for a user to identify quickly and precisely what this icon means unlike the hamburger button or cog icon which are now known by many people using computer interfaces.

Now, wouldn’t it be nice if there was an widespread, already existing user interface icon that conveys the idea of changing languages? Well, you know what? There kind of is.

The language Icon project

The language icon project attempts to change that. The language icon icon was designed during a competition in 2011.

The initiative is very interesting and the design clever.

Some could argue that this design, if never seen before, might not straight away be perceived as a language icon, but it surely would if it was used more by software vendors.

It is meant to be used for commercial and non-commercial projects. It was released under a CC license with following terms: Relax-Attribution. It means that if you use it, you are suggested but not required to attribute the work to its creator when using for internet or digital use.

If software vendors were to use it more, it would become the norm like our beloved hamburger button, and it would become an obvious choice for any developer when localizing their software.

And who knows, maybe an even better Language Icon or —even better— an Emoji defining “Change Language” will pop up one day?

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We just released a few improvements to how characters are counted on WebTranslateIt.

First of all, we now display a character counter at the bottom of each translation box.

For those of you unfamiliar with this kind of counter (it is quite widespread on translation tools), the number on the left is the amount of characters in the source text and the number on the right is the amount of characters in the target text.

If a lot of text is being typed in the translation box you will notice that the target text character count turns orange. It’s a sign that your translation could be too verbose.

We also revamped how the character counter works on segments including a character limit.

Finally, we also added one project setting to let you choose how you want WebTranslateIt to count characters: by characters or by bytes. By default we count a character as a character (using a grapheme counter).

It means that “A” is 1 character, “🤔” is 1 character and “की” is 1 character.

However, we know that some tools you rely on still count characters using bytes, and some characters are made of several bytes, so for some tools “A” would be 1 character and “🤔” and “की” would be 2 characters.

We hope you will find these improvements useful. Until then, don’t hesitate to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

We just released an update to WebTranslateIt’s search engine.

The first thing you will notice is that the “Ignore Case” checkbox is now checked by default. It was previously off by default, mainly because case sensitivity only applied to regex searches.

It means that you can now run a basic search with case sensitivity turned on or off. This allows you to search for things more precisely.

Case sensitive results:

Case insensitive results:

We also changed how searching for Source or Target text works. It now searches for stand-alone words.

Here’s an example. On this project we have many segments containing air:

Now by default, searching for air on the source text will only list text containing the word air like MacBook Air, a fresh breath of air. Previously it would had also matched words containing air like Go to the repair shop.

If you’d like to use the old behavior and search for everything containing air then just tick the “regex search” box.

We really think that the new defaults will make searching for segments easier, while by using advanced options lets you search even more precisely. We hope you will like it. Thank you for using WebTranslateIt.

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We released an update to the language file handler on WebTranslateIt. We improved the Laravel file handler and the JSON file handler. Other improvements will come along the way.

Support for short-hand arrays in PHP Laravel files

WebTranslateIt now supports short-hand arrays in PHP Laravel files.

Instead of uploading PHP Laravel files containing arrays defined like this:

<?php
return array(
  'foo' => array(
    'subject' => 'Test'
  ),
  'bar' => array(
    'subject' => 'Test 2'
  )
);

You can now upload and download language files looking like that:

<?php
return [
  'foo' => [
    'subject' => 'Test'
  ],
  'bar' => [
    'subject' => 'Test 2'
  ]
];

Custom indentation for JSON files

WebTranslateIt indents all the language files with spaces 😂 but we believe that it is a matter of taste and we shouldn’t impose our spaces indentation. It also makes huge diffs when you download back your language files to version control.

Starting today when uploading a JSON file it detects which kind of indentation you are using (2 spaces, 4 spaces, 1 tab, 2 tabs) and it saves this information to database. When generating your JSON language file we will put your original indentation back on.

More importantly, we laid the ground work for having this feature working for all files handlers. We’ll add custom indentation support for all the other file formats soon.


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WebTranslateIt has always had a policy of offering free subscriptions to non profit organizations so that they can translate their projects. Over the years, we’ve been joined by people giving life to some very interesting open source projects, like the JavaScript XMPP Client.

We asked Klaus Herberth, lead developer of JSXC to tell us more about it.

WTI: Can you tell us exactly what the JavaScript XMPP Client is?
K.H.: The JavaScript XMPP Client (JSXC) aims to expand every web application by a real-time communication center with end-to-end encrypted two-party chat, video calls, file transfer, group chat and a lot more. Beside some already adapted packages for Nextcloud, Ilias, Wordpress, SOGo and other open source projects, you can easily integrate JSXC with just a few lines of code into your website.

WTI: Who are the people who started it?
K.H.: I started JSXC as part of my Bachelor Thesis and now it’s developed by me, some colleagues from the Distributed Systems Laboratory at the University of Konstanz, Germany and a growing community.

Meet the JSXC core team.

WTI: What was your main motivation?
K.H.: The idea was to create a simple to use, secure and privacy-aware chat application which can be integrated into every website, so that people around the world can share their ideas and opinions without fear.

WTI: Why create a free product when it could have been commercialized?
K.H.: We love open source software and think thats the only way to go if you like to have a secure product. Nobody can trust in closed source software, because you don’t know what’s going on in that black box.

WTI: And finally, can you tell us how WebTranslateIt helped you along the way?
K.H.: It helped us to engage non-technical persons to the project, who like to contribute but need an easy to use interface with a clear work flow.

Klaus and his team have started translating their project into more than 20 languages and we are proud to help them reach to worldwide users.
If you are interested in the JavaScript XMPP Client, want to use it or would like to help develop it or translate it, don’t hesitate to reach out to Klaus at klaus@jsxc.org.

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We believe it is now impossible to deny global warming and the fact that we are all responsible for it, this is why we have decided to offset our carbon footprint.
We first had to calculate it, which was not easy because many websites claim to give accurate results. The best carbon footprint calculator we found was CarbonFootprint.com. The list of questions they ask is very thorough but it is still easy to answer all of them as long as you have access to your company’s expenses.

To our surprise, we discovered that the biggest impact didn’t come from our travels, electricity or water consumption but from the manufactured goods we are buying, especially high-tech ones: laptops, phones. We work remotely, so we don’t have to commute, and our servers are hosted in an already carbon-neutral datacenter in the Netherlands (Leaseweb’s amazing AMS-01).

We looked for solutions to compensate our carbon footprint for the past year and fortunately there are quite a few non-profit organizations that will offer you to participate to projects helping develop sustainable energies all over the world, especially in developing countries, or even just initiatives as simple as reforestation.

We decided to get involved with the Fondation Goodplanet which was created by the photographer and environmentalist Yann Arthus-Bertrand.

We will keep making daily efforts to change our consuming habits and will collaborate further with the Fondation Goodplanet. Join us in the fight, we believe climate change is not a fatality.

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We released an update to the translation validator so that it now inspects and detects eventual problems in the HTML code in the translations.

If some HTML code of a translation is missing or differs from the HTML code of the source text a warning message will be displayed. This will help increase the quality of the translator’s translations.

Here’s an example of when a translation’s HTML tag is missing or is completely different:

And when a translation HTML code is not properly balanced.

We also added new validation code to check the number of line breaks is identical in the source and target text:

As usual, validation warning messages are just warnings. You can always click on “Skip Validation” to save your translation anyway.

We hope you will find these improvements useful. Thank you for using WebTranslateIt.

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WebTranslateIt’s owner Edouard has been into cycling for a few years now, from the long and flat roads of the French Atlantic coast up through the wilderness of Connemara and down to the Andalusian mountains of Málaga.

It just seemed natural that if we ever were to sponsor any sport event, it would be bike related. And after a few interesting encounters, we were given the opportunity to sponsor not only an event, but a team.

There are many cycling clubs in Andalusia, for its climate allows the sport all year round —just be an early riser in the Summer!— and we decided to help a new club start out. Málaga Bikes was created in June 2017 by Bruno Cuesta and counts 8 members such as Victor Cardenas and Alejandro Paez, Andalusian mountain bike and road bike rising stars.

If you want to know more about their exploits, don’t hesitate to follow them on Strava. We are really proud of our guys!

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You can now translate XML .xtb files with WebTranslateIt.

.xtb files are XML files which are used by Google Closure Compiler. You can read more about it in our documentation about XML .xtb files.

We hope you will find this new file format useful. Thank you for using WebTranslateIt.

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