I am really happy to announce that starting today, Matt Hillman joins Atelier Convivialité on a part-time basis. He will work on developing Web Translate It product’s awareness.

Matt is british and moved two years ago from London to the west coast of Sweden. Prior to that, Matt used to play drums in a band and was working for the music team at Last.fm and later on for the marketing team at Record Union.

I am really glad to have Matt onboard. Welcome, Matt!

I am really excited to announce a really nice update to Web Translate It’s plans, and I am reasonably sure everyone will appreciate it.

One common remark made to the current price grid is that there is a huge gap between the Free plan and the Medium plan starting at 39€ a month for 2,000 strings. Also, 39€ per month is quite a lot of money for starting businesses, especially when converted into dollars (that’s currently $53).

I thought I should try to do something about that.

Introducing the Small plan

I just added a new plan: Small. Small is affordable: it costs 14€ per month (that’s just $19) and can hold up to 1,500 strings. It’s a great deal as it has almost the same capacity that used to offer the Medium plan at 39€ per month.

Small is a great plan at a fantastic price tailored for start-ups working a middle-sized application.

Increased capacity for all plans

The price remains unchanged for all other plans, but to mark the difference with the new Small plan I increased the string limit for all plans.

The medium plan now offers 4,000 strings instead of 2,000 and the Large plan now offers 8,000 strings instead of 6,000.

No action is required on your side in order to obtain the new capacity: if you subscribed to a Medium or Large plan, you already have it. You can check your new capacity on the “Organisation” page.

Limited Extra-Large plan

Finally, the Extra Large plan, which used to be unlimited, is now limited to 60,000 strings. That’s quite a lot. If you ever reach that limit, please get in touch with me so we can talk about a custom solution.

I am thrilled by this announcement, and a lot of work has been made under the hood to make Web Translate It more affordable.

I will have more exciting news to announce soon, so stay tuned and follow @webtranslateit on twitter, or subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed. Thank you for using Web Translate It, the web’s easiest translation tool.

Some users have been recommending Web Translate It to their clients and friends. I am really grateful for your help and to encourage you recommending Web Translate It, I just launched an affiliate program.

What is it?

In a nutshell, the affiliate program allows you to earn cash commissions when people sign up for a paying Web Translate It account.

The rules are pretty simple:

• Every Web Translate It user has an unique referrer code you can find on the affiliates page. You refer someone and give this person your code. To become a referrer, join Web Translate It.
• The user you refer signs up for a Medium, Large or Extra Large account (or signs up for a free account and then upgrade to a paying account later).
• The user your refer keeps a paying account for at least 60 days.
• You then receive a one-time cash commission of 20 euros to your Paypal account.

If the user your referred forgot to enter the referrer code, no sweat: just drop me a line and I will fix it for you.

If you have any questions about the affiliate program, send me an e-mail at support@atelierconvivialite.com.

Thank you for your trust and for using Web Translate It.

January is a wrap and it has been a pretty busy month.

The service uptime for January was 99,94%. That means that is to say Web Translate It was down for 24 minutes last month. It is up from the catastrophic 98,43% (11 hours, 41 minutes down) in December. This is much better, but my goal for February is to improve this.

Response time is slightly lower than last month, which is good (lower is better). I always do everything possible keep the service working, and working fast.

Feature-wise, there were 7 releases in January:

• New stats system with deferred calculations to calculate more stuff, faster.
• API and plugin enhancements so you can do more with your data.
• New reporting system to see the amount of strings and words over time and consequently bill your customers.
• Leaner interface, which makes the website load faster.
• Public projects. Web Translate It’s very first step in the world of crowd sourcing, and a huge improvement for Open Source projects.
• And finally, improved string history and threaded comments.

Web Translate It is in very active development and it is very exciting to see it quickly improving. I am always happy to hear your feedback if you have any suggestions to share.

So, what’s planned for February?

I plan to do 3 things: improve the Web Translate It plugin, improve the e-mail notifications and support Open Source projects better.

Better plugin

Well at its current state, it’s not really a plugin any more. If you don’t know it yet, Web Translate It has an open-source rubygem that provides a collection of useful rake tasks to sync back and forth your app’s language files with Web Translate It. If you use Ruby on Rails, there’s also a rack middleware built in that allow you to sync your files for each page requested.

A few weeks ago I pondered if I should make a plugin for other programming languages and frameworks. Now I think I won’t.

It would be a loss of time and energy. I would need to learn well different development frameworks in order to develop a plugin for them, and it would be a lot of work maintaining the different plugins and keeping up with their future versions.

I rather make one tool that works real good rather than three working poorly.

The next version of the plugin (or shall we call it client?) will be more generic, and the goal is to make it work well for any kind of project, as long as you have the programming language ruby installed on your machine.

Instead of rake tasks, the client will provide you with an handy executable you can run from any other programming language or framework. It will also be able to auto-configure itself as magically as possible.

If you want something native to your programming language, though, you can implement your own plugin, it is not very complicated.

Better E-mail notifications

To say it very frankly, Web Translate It’s e-mail notifications suck. If you have a large project with many translators, you just get too many e-mails and you probably already created a GMail filter for it. I will create some e-mail digests.

You will be able to choose the occurrence: once a week, once a day, every 4 hours or every 2 hours. Digests will only be sent if something happened since the last digest, and they contain a summary of your project’s activity since the last digest.

Better support for Open Source projects

I will work on a seamless integration with projects hosted on Github. Github is one of the largest open-source software hub.

There are two reasons I want to focus on this now:

• Web Translate It is a commercial software built on the shoulders of people who wrote open-source projects. I want to give back to the community what I took.
• Web Translate It needs to get known more, and supporting Open Source Software is best advertisement one can get!

Translating your project on github will be as simple as copy/pasting the address of your github project, and selecting where are the language files you want to translate.

That will be it! If you have any feedback, please share on the support forum. Thank you for using Web Translate It!

I just set up a new customer support site at Tender for Web Translate It.

Support for Web Translate It is now located at help.webtranslateit.com.

You will find there a knowledge base, a forum and a helpdesk.

If you are not a Web Translate It user, you can ask questions without creating a user account. If you are a Web Translate It user, you should already have a user account there.

Finally, all support requests sent to support@atelierconvivialite.com will be forwarded to the new support site.

Web Translate It is now on feature freeze. What I am currently working on right now is too big to be finished before the Christmas break. So that’s it for 2009!

What’s coming up next?

In the near future (January 2010), I will focus on enhancing existing feature. The stats and the API will be updated.

Stats

The new stats will be able to count strings, words, and keep a daily history. You will also be able to generate nice graphs displaying the amount of strings and words per language over time.

To make this work smoothly, some work has to be done under the hood. Calculations have to be deferred instead of being made again and again for every page load. This will use once again the same technology than the file import/export workers that proved to work really well. About 30% of Web Translate It’s calculations currently take place in the background.

The advantage is that not only you will have more detailed stats, but the pages using stats will load faster.

New API

The current API works really well, but doesn’t allow you to fetch a specific language file. This is a problem if you have several language files in your project.

The new API will allow you do just that. Although not advertised anywhere, it is actually already in production and used by some customers.

The API will also allow you to upload an update for a translation file. You could for example set up a periodic task on your server to update your translation files on Web Translate It nightly.

The Web Translate It plugin for Ruby on Rails 2.3 will also be updated to integrate these changes.

Crowdsourced translations

By the end of January, I will tackle crowdsourced translations.

I will chunk this large feature into several, simple iterations. For the first iteration I will focus on working a very simple, yet fully functional crowdsourcing interface.

• Your own user community will be able to request for a translator account. I will implement login by OpenID to make it easier for everyone to register.
• You will be able to accept or refuse these requests.
• Your community will be able to suggest new translations or vote for existing translations.
• You will be able to make the interface visible publicly or not.
• You will be able to choose among 3 different translation strategies for each language. For example:
  • Traditional: let professional translators translate that language.
  • Half Crowdsourcing: Let your users translate and suggest translations, and hire professional translators to proofread their translations. You save a fair share of the translation cost, while having high quality translations.
  • Full Crowdsourcing: Let your users translate and vote to decide which translations will go live. It can work very well if you have a huge user community for that language. It usually doesn’t work so well for smaller user communities.

That’s pretty much everything I have planned for now.

I wish you a pleasant holiday, see you in 2010!

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please take the survey. It’s always good to get your voice heard, and I always consider all of your suggestions.

The results have been incredibly useful. Thank you everyone!

Appreciation Rating

Everyone who took the survey think Web Translate It’s service and support is good: 100% of you would recommend it. This is fantastic, I am glad you appreciate it, and thanks for all the kind words in the survey, I appreciate that :)

Pricing

When it comes to pricing, the answers depend on whether the interviewee is a developer or a translator.

Translation agencies, translators and large websites find the price well adjusted. Translation agencies use Web Translate It quite a lot, so the ratio time/monthly price is fair.

Development agencies and freelance developers think Web Translate It a bit pricey. I understand it just “doesn’t worth it”. The entry level is 39€/month, this is a big cost for a freelance developer or a small development agency for something you don’t need all the time.

I want to fix this. I will get back to this topic later in this post.

Features

This is not very surprising, the most wanted features also differ from the interviewee’s job. Everyone want features to make their work easier.

Developers want integration to a Version Control System, a better API (to upload files), the ability to attach files and images to comments and have a term base.

Translation agencies would rather have better translation tools: Search and replace comes first, the ability to branch translations and a have translation memory.

It helped me establishing my roadmap for the next few months. I will share it with you in another post this week.

Suggestions

Pricing

Someone suggested a pricing based per project. You would upload your strings, you would pay a certain sum, and then you’d get access to Web Translate It for as long as you want. If later you have more strings to translate, you upload them, pay for them and off you go.

It makes sense for developers who work on projects that have very little changes over time: once the project is translated and live, they don’t need Web Translate It much.

I completely understand that Web Translate It is overpriced for this kind of use. It’s a bit like taking a Hummer to go to the supermarket.

It was the business idea I had when I started working on Web Translate It. After more thought, I noticed this business model wouldn’t work well for me.

Web Translate It is a service, and I see two ways of selling a good and reliable service:

• either by selling it monthly at a certain price. This price includes the time my customers don’t use it (week-end, holiday, when no work). This is what companies do with their employees.
• or by selling it only when my customers need it. This extra flexibility comes at an extra price. This is what companies do when hiring consultants and freelancers: they are usually paid more than employees, but if used sparingly, they cost less to the company.

Consultants and freelancers’ businesses would not work if they were paid once and used indefinitely. There has to have a time limit.

What I am going to do

You will be able to top-up your Web Translate It account with some credit. This credit will stay on your account as long as you want and won’t lose value over time (unlike some dirty phone companies). With that credit you will be able to buy time on Web Translate It, depending on your needs of the moment.

To keep things simple, time will be divided by day —the day pass— or by month —the monthly pass.

It’s a pretty good deal: for example, if you translate a small project, you probably only need a few days. You can buy day passes, which give you access to Web Translate It for the time you need. After that, if you don’t need to translate anything for a while, it won’t cost you a thing.

When the time is up, your project will be automatically locked, so you won’t be able to access or edit it, unless you use another day pass or monthly pass.

The date is not defined yet. I believe it will be implemented sometime during the first semester of 2010.

Pricing is not defined either, but the idea is that if you have an occasional use of Web Translate It, this will be really cheaper than subscribing a monthly plan. Of course, if you use Web Translate It daily, monthly plans will be cheaper. I will announce more about it when I’ll have decided it.

Work offline

Someone suggested to have the ability to work offline, and I am really enthusiastic about this idea. I for one love to cut the wire sometimes.

I can’t promise a date for this, as I have a lot of pressing feature to implement, but I will definitely keep this suggestion in mind, thanks for sharing!

Do you have other suggestions?

If you have other suggestions or ideas to share, please let me know by e-mail or on the support forum.

Thank you for all the feedback, and thank you for using Web Translate It!

Web Translate It has a rather large database of languages, territories and scripts that is used internally.

It is used to display language lists, or for the importers to figure out the plural forms. I thought some of this data could be interesting and valuable to other people.

This week-end I decided to expose this data to everyone. Here you go:

• Language database
• Territory database

It is pretty cool, I am navigating through the links since an hour now :)

You could probably find this information on Wikipedia, but the difference here is that is structured and to the point. For example, we know the relationships between a language, a territory and a script.

French for example is spoken in Belgium, Canada, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, Monaco and Senegal.

Or, Mongolian is spoken in and is written using the scripts Cyrillic and Mongolian

The other interesting data is the plural forms rules and code. When you translate a plural string from one language to another, Web Translate It automatically creates the plural rule for the target language, using the right plural forms.

For example, here is the plural rule for Russian, and here another one for Polish.

Making this data available to the public could also let people report eventual mistakes in this data.

I don’t have plans to make this data editable by users, like a wiki. This data is very critical to some Web Translate It features, so I’d rather be the sole maintainer.

I am progressively refining Web Translate It’s plans. The first step to that process is that effective immediately, new subscriptions will now offer a 10-day free trial. This is less than before, as it used to be a 30-day free trial.

This only affects new accounts. If you are currently on free trial, nothing changes: you will get all of the 30-day trial as promised.

Why?

Because offering 30 days of service for free is a bit hard on us at the moment. Web Translate It’s service is very young —it launched merely 2 months ago— and 30 days is half of our age.

Besides, I believe 10 days is still plenty of time to evaluate Web Translate It and actually know if this is the right service for you. Web Translate It’s service is pretty simple and new customers usually know after using it for a few minutes if this is the tool they need or not. If you need more time for evaluation, drop me an e-mail at support@atelierconvivialite.com and I will be happy to extend your trial period.

Also, besides the free trial, we offer two other ways to evaluate Web Translate It for free.

First, the free account which affords translating up to 500 strings. This is ideal for small projects, like an iPhone application or a small website.

Or if you have bigger needs, you can try the demo account, which lets you upload as many strings as you want. The only limit is time —3 hours, after which your account is deleted.

Atelier Convivialité’s technical support will close for christmas holiday from the 19th until the 27th of December.

Obviously, Web Translate It’s service will be open as usual, there’s no such thing as website holiday :)