The WebTranslateIt Blog

We released another small update to Web Translate It yesterday evening. You shouldn’t see much difference. However if you have unusual file encoding requirements, this should interest you.

Files used to be exclusively generated in UTF-8, with the exception of Apple .strings files, which were encoded in UTF-16 Little Endian.

Web Translate It now detect and save the original encoding of your master file. When you download your language files, they will be encoded with the same encoding as the original.

Here’s an example: if you upload a master Apple .strings file encoded in UTF-16LE, you’ll download UTF-16LE encoded files. On the other hand, if you upload a master Apple .strings file encoded in UTF-8, you’ll get UTF-8 encoded files.

I just released a new version of Web Translate It that brings up a few new features and a lot of bug fixes.

Add strings manually

Until now, you could only add strings by uploading a language file. However, depending on your workflow, it could make sense to author these language files directly from Web Translate It’s interface.

You can now create new strings manually. On your project’s translation interface, click on the new “Add a new string” link.

A modal window will appear, letting you create your new string.

New strings are added to a file of your choice. This feature is only available to managers.

String sorting

We used to sort strings by alphabetical order in the language files generated by Web Translate It. We now conserve the original order of your strings in most language files (in fact in all of them, except in YAML files due to technical limitations).

Hidden and Obsolete

Hidden strings are now separated from Obsolete strings in the translation interface.

Batch Operations to timeline

Batch Operations are now logged to the timeline.

Batch operations are actions managers can apply on a large selection of strings. You can read the introduction blog post about it.

One less feature: Update file periodically

We now longer propose to update your remote language file periodically. This feature wasn’t used much and wasn’t working very well, as some language file hosts have moved the URLs of their files and following their redirects could be the root of security issues.

Bug fixes

• Fix: Make it impossible to push target, hash-based language files (.txt, .textile, .html, .markdown) through the API.
• YAML: language root code now respects underscore or dash setting in the project settings
• YAML: digits are now exported as Integers. Everything used to be converted to String. This was causing troubles for Rails’s active support strings.
• YAML: Fix parsing bug happening on language files having flat keys.
• Labels are no longer displayed in the translation interface if no strings have been labelled.
• Fix bug with EF BB BF BOMs not being stripped by the parsers, resulting in parsing failures.
• Fix display bugs with Chrome
• API: Faster project endpoints
• Fix: don’t send comments to the same person more than once, also don’t send comment the person authoring the comment.
• Fix: Handle more gracefully cancelled invitations.

Miscellaneous

• We now have a brand new status website, courtesy of Pingdom: http://status.webtranslateit.com
• We’ve been working a lot on bettering our average response time, which wasn’t so good. We’ve been averaging 1,200 ms in February, we’re now down to less than 500 ms today. We’ll post another post explaining in details the improvements we did.

I just released a new version of our synchronisation client for Web Translate It. The Web Translate It client (also known as wti) is a powerful command line tool to synchronise your local translation files with the Web Translate It service.

Many bug fixes and small improvements were made since the version 1.7.1.0. Here’s what new in a nut:

• wti pull is much faster

• New command: wti addlocale to add new locales to your project. You can also chain locales, for instance: wti addlocale fr en es

• New: wti server is now logging to log/webtranslateit.log

• New courtesy option: --low_priority. You can use it when you upload language files en masse. Your files will be processed when Web Translate It’s server are idle. Use it like so: wti push --all --low_priority.

For more information, I invite you to have a look at the detailed changelog.

To upgrade to the latest version, gem install web_translate_it.

Are you a Microsoft Windows user? We now have some installation instructions for you.

Edit: web_translate_it 1.7.1.4 contains a small bug, which has been fixed in 1.7.1.5.

Here’s a quick system update regarding Web Translate It’s system and your data.

This morning we completed our upgrade to Rails 3, a new version of our programming framework. We also upgraded ruby, our programming language to the newest version.

We also made important changes on how your data is saved. Until today, your data was hosted on a server located in Newark, USA. A backup of the database was made 4 times a day, was encrypted and then sent to Amazon S3.

This was good, although if a big problem happened, in the worst case scenario we could potentially had lost up to 6 hours of data (this is the data added or changed between each backup).

To fix this issue, we now have a second server located in London, UK, whose only job is to replicate the database. The data is constantly streamed and replicated between the two servers.

PostgreSQL 9’s new replication feature wasn’t too difficult to set up. It was the reason we upgraded our database server 2 weeks ago.

We’re stoked to make Web Translate It more reliable.

Thank you for making 2010 the biggest year for Web Translate It so far!

Stay tuned, we’ve got big plans for 2011!