May 2013
7 posts
2 tags
New version of the Transifex client has been...
Good news everyone. We just released the version 0.9 of the client with a couple of new features and a security fix. The changes in the new version are:
Verify SSL certificates. Even though the client opened an encrypted connection
to the server, it did not validate the certificate used. As a result, the
client was open to
MITM attacks. The new
version will always validate the certificate first...
1 tag
Mike Giannakopoulos Joins the Transifex Team
We are excited to welcome Mike to the team. As a part of our design/UX team, he will be focused on making the Transifex user experience the best possible — something users will continue to love using.
To get to know him a little better, I grilled him with a few questions:
What were you doing before you joined Transifex? What was the most important thing you learned in that role?
I worked...
3 tags
More flexible management of translators has...
Today’s update brings among other things a change in the ways you can
manage your translators. The “Free for all” option that was used by
some projects for crowdsourcing their translations has been removed.
Instead, you can now choose to automatically accept volunteer
translators in your project. All projects that used the “Free for all”
option have been migrated to...
2 tags
Making Education Available Anytime, Anywhere...
Localization opens up many opportunities. So does education. When combined, the world-changing potential becomes limitless. Today, we are proud to announce a partnership with Coursera, a leading Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) provider. Together with Coursera and nine other organizations from eight countries, complete course lectures across multiple disciplines will be translated for students...
2 tags
Case Study: Connecting Fashiolista’s Global...
Fashiolista is a fast growing fashion social network with members from all over the world: New York to London and Rio de Janeiro to Tokyo. Members can save and share their greatest fashion finds from all over the web, as well as get inspiration and discover new fashion items, brands, and stores. Among Fashiolista members are many of the top fashion bloggers and influencers.
Launched in the spring...
Transifex site issue
We experienced intermittent access issues affecting our web users between May 8th and 9th, depending on your timezone. Only a small portion of our users was affected. This issue has now been resolved.
The incident was caused by an issue with our domain name registration. We’ve already taken corrective measures to ensure that similar issues do not occur.
If you were negatively impacted by this...
2 tags
10 Rules for Painless Software Localization
Your team built a killer app in English. High-fives all around. Your user-base is growing, reviews are all positive, you even caught TechCrunch’s eye. Life is good.
Then your 15 minutes are up. Sales flatten out. You start losing market share to a new competitor.
The technology sector has the memory of a goldfish. New players rise and fall every day. You stand a cold thing’s chance in a hot...
April 2013
7 posts
Why I hired Nico Sallembien as our VP of...
A few months ago, one of the engineers on our team asked me who, in my opinion, was the best engineer in the world we could hire right now. I answered squarely, “Nico Sallembien”. A little later, I gave the same answer when a VC, who was trying to convince us to raise capital quickly, asked me to name the top person I’d compliment my leadership team with.
At the time, Nico was at Twitter, where...
2 tags
Taggin' it and lovin' it
Friday’s updates brought another feature to our beloved translation editor: tags.
You can now tag the entries of your files from within the editor, either one by one…
…or many together:
And you can search for entries by tags:
Of course, you can combine the tag filter with the rest of the filters, so that, for instance, you can look only for strings that have a specific tag and contain a...
1 tag
Word count change for Japanese, Chinese and Korean
Today, we introduced a change that affects the wordcount of all projects with Japanese, Chinese or Korean as the source language.
Up until now, the word count for phrases in these languages was calculated by splitting the phrase on whitespace characters (tabs, newlines and spaces) and counting the pieces produced. However, the industry standard states that because whitespace characters in these...
2 tags
Changes in how following projects in Transifex...
A new update in Transifex has been rolled out that affects how users can follow the updates of projects.
One of the features of Transifex translators find really useful is to get notified whenever there is more work to be done. Be it volunteers that want to see their favorite project translated as soon as possible or professional translators that have deadlines to meet, it is important to know...
2 tags
Changes in notification emails
Today a new update was rolled out that affects the notifications Transifex produces. The goal was to make them much more useful to the users.
The first change is that notification emails have been grouped into well-defined categories, as you can see in the following screenshot. This makes it far easier to identify exactly the categories of notifications you are interested in receiving emails for...
2 tags
Changes in key-value formats
A change in the way an upload of a source file affects the translations for it was deployed earlier today.
When a maintainer of a project uploads an updated source file, Transifex will extract all entries from the file and save them in the database. At the same time, it will invalidate all translations for the entries that were changed or deleted completely.
Until now, Transifex would look...
Translating Natural Language to Code
Update (2 Apr 2013): Happy April Fool’s day!
We’ve all been there. A long meeting where software engineers have to make an architecture decision. It’s been dragging on for hours; no one seems to agree on anything. The discussions become heated as engineers visualize the suggested solutions with drawings and code samples on a whiteboard.
This happened to us last November while brainstorming about...
March 2013
3 posts
4 tags
Concordance search added to the web editor
Today’s update brings a much-requested feature to the web editor, concordance search,that allows for a more fine-grained use of the Translation Memory of the project.
This new feature enables translators to search for a specific word or phrase in the project’s Translation Memory. The search results show all segments containing that word or phrase along with their translation, the...
3 tags
Case Study: Helping translation agency e2f...
What do you do when the 2008 Financial Crisis hits your business and your growth drops from over 20% per year to a projected rate in the single digits?
For e2f, the world’s largest English to French translation agency and industry leaders in language production management, there wasn’t much of a choice. With approximately 30% of their revenue going toward production costs, it was simple: adapt to...
2 tags
February 2013
2 posts
1 tag
Part of the (Startup) Pack
When the startup he co-founded closed its doors, Matthieu Vaxelaire ventured on to found Startup Pack. His non-profit partnered with 12 companies to give away $10,000 software bundles to a thousand startups. And TechCrunch and The Next Web covered the story.
Today, Matthieu rolled out Startup Pack for Developers. We’re stoked to tell you that Transifex is one of 15 companies offering their...
3 tags
Meet our new partner, Gengo
Transifex is a great way to manage your content and internationalization files. But a lot of people have asked us where they can find translators.
We like the team at Gengo and share a similar belief that with the help of technology, companies can go global more easily and in a less painful way. So we partnered with them and their worldwide network of 7,500+ translators.
Starting today,...
December 2012
1 post
Nikos Vassiliou is a Transifexian
We are thrilled to share that Nikos Vassiliou has joined the Transifex developer team. Nikos will be hacking away on our brand new super snazzy translation editor and other code-heavy parts of new Transifex services.
Nikos has been a startup founder and chief architect for more than 4 years now. He has written millions of lines of code for 3D engines and apps running on anything from huge...
October 2012
1 post
Microsoft Translator updates
Today we’re rolling out an update to our machine translation functionality. We are replacing the old and deprecated Bing AppIDs with Windows Azure Marketplace authentication tokens, which, since recently, is the recommended way to use Microsoft’s machine translation API.
This means that all projects currently using Bing Translator as a machine translation backend will have to get new...
September 2012
2 posts
3 tags
Hosting Sphinx documentation on GitHub
As many other Python-based projects, we use Sphinx to document the various
components of Transifex.
During the last days, we wanted to decomission the server that hosted the
documentation of our service since the rest of Transifex has already moved to a different cloud provider. We already preserve the history of the docs in Git,
so, instead of moving the docs section to the new provider, we...
2 tags
Python format strings validation
Python format strings is the new trend in writing strings in Python. Since more and more developers choose to use them, it goes without saying that this relatively new type should be supported by Transifex; and that is exactly what we did. Format strings in PO files are now recognized and by setting the python-format flag in the source PO file, you can make our validation functionality kick off...
August 2012
2 posts
1 tag
New Transifex blog
As you may have noticed, today our blog got a major facelift. That’s because we have migrated to a different blogging platform, more suitable for our needs, powered by disqus to provide comment functionality. We hope you like it as much as we do!
The old posts are still available at oldblog.transifex.com.
Updated support for YAML files
Today’s update
brings a new parser for YAML files that:
is faster.
handles correctly some edge cases of YAML syntax the previous one
had issues with.
removes untranslated entries from downloaded translation files, when
they are downloaded to be used in the user’s program instead of for
offline translation by translators.
All new resources for YAML files will automatically use the...
July 2012
1 post
New glossary features
Today’s update brings a brand-new, full-fledged version of the glossary!
Here is a list of some of the highlights:
More information is stored for each entry of the glossary, making it more useful to translators. Additionally, all terms defined in the glossary are now highlighted in lotte.
Users can download glossaries as CSV files.
Project owners can share their glossaries between...
April 2012
1 post
2 tags
The life cycle of a translation resource
One of the core features Transifex provides is handling files
with translatable content (resources) in various
localization formats,
like XML or PO files.
Part of that functionality is to be able to import such files to its
internal storage and export them, whenever the user requests them, either
to ship them with his software or to translate the file to another
language with his local...
March 2012
4 posts
1 tag
Tip: Filtering entries in the editor
As you might already know, in Lotte it’s possible to filter the strings appearing on the table by checking some filters available on the top of the editor, like Translated, Untranslated and Reviewed.
What you might not know is that it’s also possible to use some keywords on the text box in order to get some more limited results. The keywords currently available are:
file: Accepts file paths,...
Sponsoring PyCon: Prizes for star projects
We’re proud to announce that we’ll be a small sponsor at PyCon. We’re excited to be offering the following free packages as prizes to various PyCon projects of total e-value of $11.000:
GetCloak, Startup Row Judge’s Pick, gets a free 6-month subscription to the Premium Plan ($299/mo)
The ten Startup Row winners get a 6-month subscription to our Plus Plan ($99/mo)...
Rocking it at the Python Conference
The following weekend, 9-10 March 2012, PyCon is taking place. PyCon is the place to be if you’re a Python developer or company building its products on top of Python. Of course, Python and Django awesomeness are all over Transifex, so we wouldn’t miss it for the world.
Here are our activities for this year’s PyCon:
We were participating in this year’s Pycon Startup...
reddit switching to Transifex for agile...
According to Alexa, reddit is the #50 most visited site in the US and #120 globally. 2 billion pageviews, 35 million visitors. Per month.
So, when the Tx team finally read that reddit is switching its localization to Transifex, we experienced a small nerdgasm.
reddit localization challenges
Similarly to many modern, addictive and super-popular websites, reddit’s success is driven by...
February 2012
2 posts
1 tag
Eating our Own Dogfood: Translating
How will you ever build a trully good product if you don’t use it yourself? In order to be able to design great features that make sense and are useful to your users it goes without saying that you know of their needs first-hand.
This post introduces a series about how we use our own product to translate itself to many languages. The first post will be about the actual translation and the...
1 tag
Selected for PyCon Startup Row
Transifex is the Judge’s Pick for this year’s Python Conference Startup row. Woohoo!
PyCon is the largest annual gathering for the community using and developing the open-source Python programming language. Somewhere around 10.000 people attend the conference and its sponsors include companies like Google, Dropbox, Heroku, Facebook and Twitter.
PyCon’s Startup Row event...
November 2011
1 post
1 tag
A little bug bites the dust: the anatomy of fixing...
Hi all,
We had another update today with two small changes. But we would like to talk specifically about a particular update, the one that improved the responsiveness of the access control page of a project.
The issue
A few days ago we noticed that the above page was responding very slowly under certain circumstances; if the user was authenticated, he would have to wait a few seconds to view...
October 2011
1 post
3 tags
Changing the Database Schema
Running a web application means that you always develop new features (and fix bugs) which should be deployed as soon as possible. This is the only way these enhancements reach your users. However, it also means that your application is used by people from all over the world, i.e., there is no point in time, when you can just shutdown the servers and do any necessary maintenance work; downtime...
