Strings sometimes contain quite a lot of untranslatable content. URLs, HTML tags, code… For translators, translating these strings really are a pain, because the content is not translatable, but there also shouldn’t be any mistakes while retyping it.

I just released an update that should make translating strings containing untranslatable content more fun. Let’s have a look at how it works.

Let’s consider this string. It contains quite a lot of code.

Open the string’s form. It makes code clickable.

Click on the code and it will be pasted to the translation box. It’s that easy!

Here’s a quick video showing how this feature works

I hope you will find this improvement useful. Thank you for using WebTranslateIt!

We’ve had embeddable charts for years now, but it was then only possible to embbed them for public projects (these are projects have all pages accessible to the public and allowing visitors to apply as a translator).

We now have new charts embeddable for just any project. Here’s mine:

You’ll find the new charts in your project settings, under “Goodies”.

Translation Resources is a new feature to fine-tune the content of your Translation Memory.

In the project settings, you’ll find 2 new settings under the “Translation Resources” tab.

Fine-tuneable Project Translation Memory

Your Project Translation Memory is now configurable.

Select the projects you want to re-use, and suggestions from these projects will be displayed as you translate.

Use another Term Base

We sometimes work on several projects having the same terminology: for instance a web app and a mobile app for the same company. And in this case we’d like to be able to reuse the Terminology Database from one project over to another.

You can now select the Term Base you want to use in the TermBase settings.

I hope you will find this new feature useful. Thank you for using WebTranslateIt.

Developer comments are instructions or help for translators left by developers in a locale file.

They are very different from regular comments. Comments are meant to be used for discussion, whereas developer comments as meant to be used for leaving a brief instruction to a translator.

When importing most language files, WebTranslateIt automatically extracts these developer comments and displays them in the translation interface, so they are visible to translators.

You can author or edit a developer comment from the web interface. Click on the “option” button, then “Details” (keyboard shortcut: press the d key after selecting a string).

A modal window appears and lets you type a comment. The length of a developer comment is limited to 140 characters to force you to keep your message short: these instructions should convey the idea quickly to translators.

Advanced features

Did you know you can upload and attach screenshots to developer comments to illustrate your comment? Use it to upload a screenshot of your app to show where a string is located, for instance.

Perhaps the killer feature is that developer comments are formatted using Markdown. The Markdown syntax allows you can create links, display images… the possibilities are almost limitless.

In this example, I used the markdown syntax to display an image inline.

Now, here’s real-life example: one of our users pushed the usefulness of this feature even further. They use WebTranslateIt to translate a list of products for an online shop pulled from their database. They wanted to convey more context to translators: how different is this shoe look compared to this other shoe?

They had the idea of programmatically format their developer comments so a small thumbnail representing their product is displayed on the translation interface for each string. Is there a better way to give context to a translator than that?

Web Translate It automatically detects your file’s character encoding. I already wrote a blog post on how it works under the hood.

If the encoding of one of your file is wrongly detected or if you would like to change your encoding, there is an advanced —and somewhat hidden— option to set a specific encoding directly from the file manager.

Here’s how to do it. In the File Manager, hover the file you want to change, and click “rename”.

A modal window appears. Click on “Toggle advanced options”.

There you can type a specific character encoding, for instance ISO 8859-1, UTF-8 or UTF-16.

Web Translate It generally does a great job detecting your file encoding, so this option shouldn’t be useful for most users. But if you need it, this gives you even more control on how your files are imported and created.

Project managers can remove a label applied to several strings in batch. This is useful to quickly remove a label which is no longer relevant.

To remove a label, click on “Filters”, then on the “Labels” button.

Click on a “delete” button to remove a label.

Click on the » symbol on Web Translate It’s translation interface to quickly invert the locales displayed in the translation interface.

Let’s switch from “English to French” to “French to English”:

I can now read the French copy and edit the English text.

When you get your project translated you’ll need to count words. Web Translate It has nice statistics for your project over time. You can get them on the “Locale and Statistics” page.

Click here to view more

But what if you need to get a word count for a subset of strings? For instance, the word count for a specific file in your project, or for the strings added last week? No problem.

On the translation interface, filter strings by chosen parameters: file, label, category, date added. Then mouse over the string reporting: a tooltip will display the word count for the strings you selected.

Here’s a quick tip: on Web Translate It’s translation interface, you can get a definition very quickly: select any word with the mouse, and hit the D key (a keyboard shortcut for Define).

It will open the dictionary and lookup a definition and translation for you.

Remember, you can view all of Web Translate It’s keyboard shortcuts by clicking on the “keyboard shortcuts available” link on the translation interface.

The other reason of migrating Web Translate It to a new architecture wasn’t only improving page speed. It was also to be able to develop a new feature: custom locales.

What is a locale?

A locale is a set of parameters that defines the user’s language, country and any special variant preferences that the user wants to see in their user interface. Usually a locale identifier consists of a language identifier and a region identifier.

When you create a locale on Web Translate, a tool assists you to build your locale. It maps your locale to a locale known by Web Translate It.

It creates well formed locales. For instance en, en-GB, en-GB_Latn, ru_Cyrl, etc. This prevents users from creating locales that don’t make sense, for instance en_Arab (English with script Arabic) or fr_Cyrl (French with script Cyrillic).

This is useful, because Web Translate It has a lot of information about locales in database, for instance the locale directionality (Left to Right or Right to Left?) or the locale plural rules and helps the translator translate accordingly.

One drawback, though, is that it forces you to use already existing locales.

Why would you want to create custom locales?

Depending on your workflow, you sometimes need to create “fake” locales to hold a temporary copy.

For instance, if your development team write an English copy that needs to be proofread, you might want to create a fake locale “English by developers”. The copy in this locale will, in turn, be modified and proofread by a professional proofreader before being translated into other languages.

Another reason could be that your app needs a specific custom locale based on a very specific location. There can be many good reasons.

So, how to build a specific locale?

In the Locale manager, start by choosing a base locale. Then, click on “Create a specific locale” to toggle additional options.

These additional options will be postfixed to the base locale code and name.

• Postfix code is a code that will be postfixed to the locale code. For instance dev.
• Postfix description is the description of the postfix you add. For Instance “by developers”.

This will generate a new custom locale with the code en_dev and name “English by developers”.