Web Translate It Update

By Edouard on November 17, 2010

It has been a while since I posted an update. Rest assured that Web Translate It is regularly updated with timely bug and security fixes.

I released two important new features to Web Translate It this week.

Fallback parser

The fallback parser will allow you to import virtually any kind of files to Web Translate It.

When you upload a language file to Web Translate it, the file goes through a parser which extracts each entries to translate, and displays them nicely in the translation interface.

I developed a bunch of parsers so most people are able to translate their apps.

But what if you use a file format that’s not supported? Until today you were out of luck. This new update brings the ability to import unsupported files “as a whole”. Meaning that if you use a custom or exotic file format for your internationalisation, Web Translate It will now import the whole file without extracting the entries.

This is a huge improvement as you can now use Web Translate It to translate virtually anything.

Enhancements to team page

The new team page makes it easier to message your team members, or to message the whole team.

This is a first step towards improving communication within large translation teams. Important changes to the commenting system are in the works and coming soon.

Other changes

Many small improvements, bug and security fixes were made.

  • Security: Application cookies are now secured. They cannot be transferred by other means but encrypted through SSL.
  • Bug: E-mail addresses to sign in the site are now case insensitive. According to the RFC 5321 specification it is technically possible to have multiple email addresses whose local-parts are the same characters but of different case. However this is extremely rare and confusing users: if you signed up using John@example.com you couldn’t sign in using john@example.com.
  • Bug: File Fetch API now returns the status 102 Processing if the user attempts to download the language file whilst being imported.
  • Bug: Deleting a string from the web interface now rebuilds the language files
  • Bug: Searching for text having a dash (for instance “e-mail”) is no longer incorrectly considered as a negation search by the search engine.
  • Enhancement: Support for multiline comments in Apple .strings files
  • Enhancement: Enhancements to the PHP .ini parser. The parser now supports entries unquoted, quoted with a single quote, and quoted with a double quote.
  • Enhancement: Updated the JSON parser to spit out more meaningful parsing error messages.
  • Enhancement: .resx files generated by Web Translate It don’t include empty comment tags if there are no comments to export.
  • Enhancement: Entries in language files are now sorted by key name, case insensitive.
  • Enhancement: It is now possible to choose whether your locale names use dashes (for instance en-US) or underscores (en_US). This is a project setting that affects the file names.
  • Enhancement: Fix empty translation suggestions from Google Translate. Web Translate It’s requests were not getting any results.
  • Enhancement: Add updated_at timestamp for each files on the Project API. You can expect a much faster version of the web_translate_it rubygem coming soon.
  • Enhancement: Add support for .conf files.

That’s about it! I hope you will find these improvements useful. Thank you for using Web Translate It.