The WebTranslateIt Blog

I released Wednesday a new version of the web_translate_it rubygem. This update brings one new feature: the synchronisation console.

Introducing the Synchronisation Console

After installing the rubygem (gem install web_translate_it), go to your project directory and run:

wti server

It will start a server on the port 4000. Then, go over to http://localhost:4000 with your web browser and access the synchronisation console. It’s that easy!

The synchronisation console displays all your language files, and whether or not they have been committed to your repository (it only works if you use git) and if a new version of your language file is available on Web Translate it. You can also download the latest version of your language files by just clicking a button.

What is it for?

A translation team works on translating your application. Every time translators want to test their work in your application (to see if a translation fits or doesn’t break your app, for example) they have to ask a developer to pull the translation files from Web Translate It. Using this tool, they can now do it by themselves.

Setup wti server on a staging website, give your translation team access to both the staging site and the synchronisation console and you have an almost effortless way to increase the quality of your translations.

Advanced Usage

I made this tool very extensible. You can choose the host name and the port you want to start the server on. You can also setup hooks in the configuration file, so you can for example restart the application server after refreshing the language files, and regenerate the site if you work a static site.

To learn more about this, please refer to the tool documentation.

All credit goes to Tom Lea from Reevoo.com for his excellent rack-webtranslateit. I pinched his idea and made it less specific to ruby projects, so it can be used for pretty much any kind of application.

Web Translate It now support a bunch of new file formats:

• HTML/XHTML,
• Microsoft .aspx, which really is decorated HTML,
• Markdown (.md, .markdown),
• Textile (.textile)

So we now support a grand total of 10 different file formats. That’s plenty!

• Gettext .pot/.po,
• Ruby .yml,
• Java .properties,
• Microsoft .resx (.net),
• Microsoft .aspx,
• PHP .ini,
• Apple .strings,
• Markdown .md, .markdown
• Textile .textile
• Plain text .txt

Do you need another language file format we don’t support? Let us know on our support forum, and we’ll implement it within days.

I just added a new endpoint to Web Translate It’s API: Create File. This endpoint will allow you to send to Web Translate It new master language files through the API.

This endpoint’s usage is explained in the documentation.

The rubygem has been updated to take advantage of this new endpoint. With the new version 1.6.7 you can now do:

wti add path/to/master_file_to_add

This will send this new master language file to Web Translate It. Note that is should only be used to send new master language files that are not already on Web Translate It.

Updating an existing master or target language file should be done using the usual wti push command.

More improvements are planned for the rubygem, such as the ability to send several files at the same time, or the ability to the language files you have locally that are not sent to Web Translate It.

I hope you will find this new endpoint useful.

If you use Web Translate It extensively you might have noticed a few error pages yesterday, when loading pages or saving strings.

The reason of these errors is that the database server is sometimes overloaded and crashes at peak time.

I take this problem very seriously, and in fact I think most of the issues are now fixed. I tuned the database server, pushed some important optimisations that will make the service much more reliable than yesterday. I will carry on working on optimising the service today.

Tonight I will also upgrade Web Translate It’s hardware, which will require to reboot the server. Rebooting the server should take less than 5 minutes, and the service should be completely operational a few minutes after that. Therefore I reserve a window of 20 minutes downtime tonight from 9PM to 9.20PM GMT+1.

I apologise for the short notice and for the inconvenience this downtime will cause, but this downtime will be very short and make the service a lot more reliable.

EDIT: The maintenance went well. The service was down for about 4 minutes, according to Pingdom, and it took another 5 minutes to restart the workers and search engine before the service was 100%.

I upgraded Web Translate It’s slice memory from 1.2GB to 1.5GB, and I increased the database cache. Some indexes were corrupted due to the crashing, so I also rebuilt the indexes.

Here’s a tiny improvement to help you translate better complex strings.

Non-obvious white spaces are now indicated by tiny blue dashes. By non-obvious spaces I mean:

• Space or spaces preceding a string

• Space or spaces suffixing a string

• Two or more consecutive spaces in a sentence.

In software, extra spaces are often here for a reason, and it is important for the translations to have them, too.

When you hover the string, spaces highlight, so you won’t miss them.

And finally, these highlighted spaces are really spaces, so you can select, copy and paste them as usual.