WebTranslateIt Blog

Web Translate It now allows you to navigate the translation interface and translate strings using keyboard shortcuts. This is a great new feature, I hope you will like it.

When you load the translation interface, you will notice the first string in the list is now highlighted with a yellow background.

It means the string is selected. You can interact with selected strings in many ways.

Navigation

Press the ↓ key to select the string underneath.

Press ↑ key to move one string up.

Finally, translate any selected string by pressing the enter key.

Using keyboard shortcuts in Web Translate It is very simple and similar in many ways to other spreadsheet applications: up and down to move, enter to edit.

Editing a string

Opened strings now automatically load the translation suggestions. You can apply a suggestion by using key combinations:

• Ctrl 1 applies the first suggestion,
• Ctrl 2 applies the second suggestion,
• Ctrl 3 the third, etc.

You can also save a string using Ctrl s, or leave the string without saving using esc.

Advanced navigation

On highlighted strings, you can also use the following shortcuts:

• p for proofreading or unproofreading a string,
• c to comment on a string
• v to paste the source text on a string,
• → displays the translation history for that string,
• ← brings you back to the translation interface from that page.

You will find some great help about all these shortcuts by clicking on the “Keyboard shortcuts available” link on the translation interface, or by hitting the h key anytime on the translation interface.

I hope you will find this improvement useful. Thank you for using Web Translate It.

One thing we often need when internationalizing software is translating country and language names. Translating this data manually is a pain, and a lot of work.

Many developers don’t know about CLDR, Unicode’s Common Locale Data Repository, which contains translation and information about pretty much everything a software could need. It contains translations for country names, language names, currencies, and many other things.

However, CLDR data is a bit difficult to consume in an app, because it is composed of large XML files containing a lot of different things.

Introducing locale_data

I just released locale_data, which was extracted out of Web Translate It.

locale_data is a collection of country and language names, translated into hundreds of languages, and stored into YAML files for easy consumption in apps. For instance, here’s the list of countries in German, or in Spanish.

The data itself comes from CLDR, and rake tasks are provided to update the translation files whenever a new version of CLDR comes out.

You can get locale_data for free on Github.

Today someone asked me if Web Translate It support bidi scripts.

What are bidi scripts?

Bi-directionnal scripts is text containing text in both directionalities, that is to say both right-to-left (RTL) and left-to-right (LTR). This is fairly frequent, for example Arab text containing English brand names.

Web Translate It support LTR, RTL and bi-directionnal text in its web interface. More precisely, Web Translate It automatically select the correct text directionality based on the language and script you choose.

Bi-directionnality is a web-browser feature. It works fine with Firefox 3.5, Google Chrome and Safari 4.

Thank you for using Web Translate It!