The WebTranslateIt Blog

i18n news and Product Updates about WebTranslateIt

What’s new in WebTranslateIt? A 2022 Recap

By Edouard on October 11, 2022

We’ve been busy working on the app. Here’s an update of what we’ve been up to.

A large infrastructure update

We have spent a few months working on upgrading our app framework Ruby on Rails to the latest version 7. We also upgraded ruby to the latest version 3.1.

While doing so, we also worked on increasing our test code coverage. We also ran tools such as rubocop to standardize our code.

We also upgraded our translation serialization system which previously relied on a custom serializer using YAML to use native Postgres JSONB fields. It looks like nothing, but migrating close to 90 million translations took us over a week!

Overall these upgrades were a lot of work, but were worth it, as they helped us increase our software quality, standardize the way we write code and increased the website performance while lowering our resources usage.

We have replaced our Translation Memory engine

We have been using Sphinx Search for almost 10 years (we’re not getting any younger are we? 😳) and it has served us well. However our database server PostgreSQL now integrates a great full-text search engine, and it is easier to maintain it than having both PostgreSQL and Sphinx running side by side. So we simplified our stack and now use PostgreSQL to run our translation memory.

We have also set up a series of tests and benchmarks to maintain and improve the translation memory speed and relevance, and we will keep improving on it.

All our infrastructure and providers are now in the European Union & GDPR compliant 🇪🇺

We hired a GDPR specialist and revised our Data Processing Agreement and improved our GDPR support.

We were also advised to make some changes on the providers we use (namely Amazon S3 hosted in the US and Mailchimp) to use similar services hosted in the European Union. Our Amazon S3 assets are now hosted in Germany and our newsletter by MailJet. You can see a list of all our providers on our Privacy page.

We value our users’ privacy so we’re now proudly made and hosted in the EU, and we’re also Carbon Neutral since 2017.

New homepage

We have a new homepage! You can see it when you are signed out of WebTranslateIt. The new homepage uses a new responsive design and includes a lot of new illustrations.

Auto-Translate

We’ve released a new feature for the organisations on the Enterprise plan: Auto-Translate.

Auto-Translate is a feature that lets you use the translations hosted on the different projects on your organization and automatically apply them to your projects right when a new translation candidate appears.

For instance if you add segments to a project and some of these new segments’ text have already been translated elsewhere (on your project or on another project hosted on your organization) it will use the other translations and apply them to your new segments.

It also works if a translator translates a segment on a project and if another similar segment exists elsewhere on your organization: as the first segment gets translated, the similar segments will get translated automatically.

New versions of the wti CLI tool

We’ve released several versions of our synchronisation tool wti. The latest changes include compatibility with ruby 3.1 and we’ve just added a new subcommand wti status path/to/file to see the translation statistics about a file.

If you don’t know about wti, you should try it it’s a great command-line tool to easily sync your language files with WebTranslateIt.

We also now have a docker package for wti.

Update to the Translation Interface

We’ve updated the Translation Interface with a brand new search bar which integrates case-sensitive and regex search. We hope you like these changes.

New Organization API Endpoint: Delete a collaboration

By Edouard on September 29, 2022

Today we released a new API endpoint to delete a Collaboration.

A collaborator is a person working on your organization and projects. Deleting a collaboration does the following:

it removes the user from the organization,
it removes any project memberships,
it cancels any unaccepted invitations on your organization’s projects,
it removes any team memberships,
it cancels any unaccepted invitations on your organization’s teams.

So that person won’t be able to access anything on the organization.

I hope you will find this new feature helpful to manage your users. Thank you for using WebTranslateIt!

We’re deprecating JSONP support on our API

By Edouard on September 28, 2022

We’re removing JSONP support on all our API endpoints. JSONP (JSON with Padding) is a historical JavaScript technique for requesting data by loading a <script> element, and is ancient technology now.

It could be used to load data from our API using Javascript from another domain, by bypassing same-origin policy, which disallows running JavaScript code to read media DOM elements or XMLHttpRequest data fetched from outside the page’s originating site.

JSONP has been superseded with CORS in modern applications.

We’ve monitored our API usage over the past few days and nobody is using JSONP, so this deprecation shouldn’t impact anyone.

The character counter and character limits in WebTranslateIt

By Edouard on April 12, 2022

Do you translate? Do you know what the character counter is? Here is another trick for our power-translators out there.

When translating software, it is important to keep the size of the text your type as concise as possible, as it can cause size problems (text overflowing elements or going out of the viewport, etc). The character counter you can see at the bottom right of the translation text area gives you a soft warning when the text you typed in is more than twice as large as the size of the source text.

When translating size-constraint segments, the character counter gives you a hard warning that you went over the limit, and actually prevents you from saving your translation.

This is the sixth episode of our new series of posts with short, useful tips showing you how to use some of the most advanced features in WebTranslateIt that maybe you didn’t know existed.

Do you find these tips and tricks useful? Let us know on Twitter @webtranslateit if you like this series of posts.

How to filter segments by more than one label

By Edouard on March 29, 2022

Did you know you could filter segments by more than one label? Well you can. This trick is for power users.

In the Translation Interface, click on the first label you’d like to filter by. Then, go to the address bar and search for the label parameter. Replace the label name by square brackets [ ] and then type in the label names you want to search by separated by commas. You should have something like labels=[label1,label2].

This is the fourth episode of our new series of posts with short, useful tips showing you how to use some of the most advanced features in WebTranslateIt that maybe you didn’t know existed.