Batch operations and a few tiny improvements

By Edouard on April 28, 2010

Managers will find a new feature on Web Translate It’s translation interface: batch operations. This is a very powerful feature.

What does it do?

Batch operations apply a specific action on a batch of strings you selected.

To use it, start by listing the strings you want to modify, using the filters by categories, files, date, status… When you’re happy with your list of strings, click on « batch operations », and choose one of the 6 operations available.

  • Proofread— proofread all the translated strings listed on the page.
  • Unproofread— unproofread all the translated strings listed on the page.
  • Copy text from source— copy the source text to the target strings, and flag these strings as “to verify”, so you can find them and translate them later. I think many WTI users will find this useful: a lot of Web Translate It users want to download their language files including source strings when translations are missing. You now can do it.
  • Populate— populate your translations with machine translations from, and flag your populated strings as “to verify”. It’s great for developers to quickly have a full language file to test their app, but really the translations often leave to be desired and have to be verified by a translator.
  • “Untranslate”— clean all your strings from their translations. Perfect to start over a translation.
  • Delete— delete all the strings listed.

Operations run in the background, so you can leave the page or close your web browser while it is running.

This feature has been designed to be as flexible and powerful as possible. These operations might overwrite your strings. For example, if you choose “populate” on all your strings, even the translated strings will be replaced by machine translations, which may or may not be what you want to do. We leave it up to you to refine your selection to for example, the untranslated strings.

With these 6 batch operations, Web Translate It now can really fit any kind of translation workflow.

Other improvements

  • new lines and spaces are now preserved when displaying source and target strings in the translation interface. Useful when translating code.

  • Very long strings now wrap and don’t break the layout.

  • Animations when editing a string have been removed. Editing a string is much faster now.
  • Support for 2 new file formats: Markdown (.md, .markdown) and Textile (.textile). We also extract strings to translate from HTML/XHTML files but this is still very experimental. This is great to translate user documentation.

For example, Web Translate It’s documentation, which is a mix of HTML and Markdown files, is translated with Web Translate It.

More tiny improvements are to be announced this week. Subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed or follow us on Twitter to keep up to date!