The WebTranslateIt Blog

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.

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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