Transifex blog

New version of the Transifex client has been released

mpessas — Wed, 22 May 2013 10:59:00 -0400

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 and refuse to connect to the server if there is a problem with it.
Add support for soft links in UNIX systems. You can now use soft links in your project directories. This would be useful in cases where you have a large project and you would prefer to assign the localization files to multiple Transifex projects.
Add support for local .transifexrc files. You can now have a .transifexrc file in your project directory. The entries in the file will override the ones from the main one. This would be useful in cases you would prefer to use a different set of credentials for a project than the ones you use for the rest of your projects in Transifex.
Make the client more friendly to users in Windows. The .tx/config file now supports forward slashes for the paths in Windows, in accordance to what UNIX uses. As a result, people can now share a .tx/config irrespective of whether they use a UNIX-based system (like Linux and Mac OS X) or Windows.

Every user is encouraged to upgrade to the new version.

Mike Giannakopoulos Joins the Transifex Team

txsam — Tue, 21 May 2013 15:13:00 -0400

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 as a technical director for a local news aggregator (Palo.gr) and helped evolve the initial idea from a website with little page views into one of the top 10 local news sites. This aggregator collects and produces a lot of data from the web, so there was a large amount of raw material to work with. I learned to translate that raw data to something valuable for the visitor/user, both functionally and visually.

You sent in your resume to Transifex, what were the thoughts going through your head?

My first thought was how great it would be to work with a team that already has proven to be intelligent and fast paced. I knew it would be an opportunity to participate in something already big with great potential.

Now that I am part of the team, I still am excited to start exchanging interactivity and design ideas with Transifex users.

What was the moment that you realized you wanted to be a designer / UX developer? And what’s the best part about it?

I liked computers since I was a kid and soon realised that what I liked most was to build stuff. In the beginning, I was into the graphics field. Later on, when I started working on websites, I valued the interactivity aspects of a design.

In a slow and steady pace I came to admire the power that a good design hides. What I like the most is the skill of translating technical specifications/requirements to something useful and beautiful for everybody.

What’s the favorite thing you’ve designed or built, either at Transifex or elsewhere?

My favourite so far is an interactive visualisation of complex data that I created to showcase the potentials of a data manipulation. I enjoyed the whole process from selecting the appropriate data to figuring out and implementing the interactivity on those elements. The result, although quite technical, showcased a variety of possibilities some of which were later used in production. Sorry, I can’t disclose any more info than this.

What’s your development environment like? What are the tools you cannot live without?

I mostly work with two or three different tools. I have Sublime, which is a simple text editor for coding, PhotoShop or Gimp for color selection and mockup designs, and pen and paper for thoughts and ideas. The internet is really helpful; I surf a lot to find new ideas and new ways to implement things. I also use HipChat and Skype to keep up to date with my colleagues. Those are the most used.

If you were a character from a movie or TV show, you would be… ? And why?

Well…there isn’t anyone specific. The model of a character that clicks for me is the classic funny action hero: resourceful even with a small toolset in hands, utilising the surroundings to his benefit, and always with a smile and smart line.

Yippee-Ki-Yay … ;)

When you aren’t desigining / coding, you are… ?

I mostly spent time with my family. Also I try to workout a bit. I enjoy movies, music and good talks with friends.

More flexible management of translators has arrived

mpessas — Mon, 20 May 2013 09:33:00 -0400

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 the new configuration.

Transifex used to offer two choices controlling which translators are allowed to contribute to your translation efforts: You could either use teams, in which case the translator would send a request to join the team and someone had to accept that request, or set the project as free for all, in which case anyone could work on your files.

However, both options were not flexible enough for projects that need to manage their community of translators. The “free for all” choice meant the project managers had to give up a lot of control about their project; anyone could do anything. As a result, it was not an option for many. On the other hand, if you used teams for your project, your community translators had to go through the process of someone accepting them first in the team. But people who are excited about bringing your project to their language should be allowed to do so with as little friction as possible.

So, we felt we needed to provide a more flexible model for crowdsourcing, one that would benefit both the managers of a project and its translator community. That is why we removed the “free for all” option today and added, instead, the option to automatically accept new translators in your project. Moreover, all projects that were set as “free for all” will now use teams and have this option enabled.

The new configuration addresses the shortcomings of both previous options.

First you retain full control over your project at all times. For instance, you can now explicitly specify some of the translators as reviewers. This way, you can have a trusted circle of people who guarantee the quality of the translations, but still benefit from your community of enthusiast translators.

Additionally, you have better control and visibility over your translators; you will know who they are. This allows you to more easily form a community around your project. As an example, you will be able to reach out to them through Transifex, whenever help is needed.

At the same time, the translators can easily join the localization efforts of your project without any red-tape delays, but just with a click of a button.

Let us know what you think.

P.S. If you would like to set your project to accept new translators automatically, you can do so in your project settings under “Access control.”

Making Education Available Anytime, Anywhere Across Language Barriers

txsam — Wed, 15 May 2013 15:38:00 -0400

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 around the world, for free.

Leading translation companies, philanthropic organizations, mobile carriers, nonprofits, corporations, and universities have joined forces in this Global Translation Partners Program with Coursera. Each of these organizations will begin by translating 3 to 5 select courses into Russian, Portuguese, Turkish, Japanese, Ukrainian, Kazakh, and Arabic, with the majority of translated courses available by this September.

To make this possible, Coursera is relying on our continuous localization platform. Our cloud-based tool will host Coursera’s translatable content and allow these organizations and individuals to easily contribute course translations from anywhere, using our translation editor.

For the time being, course lectures will be translated via subtitles while all other course material, including quizzes and assignments, will remain in the course’s original language. Coursera’s long-term goal, though, is to have their platform localized to global audiences.

Since their launch, Coursera has been taking big strides to connect people with a great education and help students learn without limits. In past few months, they’ve added 29 new universities to its platform, including 16 international schools that offer courses in Chinese, French, Italian and Spanish. In April 2013, Coursera also kicked off a pilot translation project with Russian organization Digital October.

Just as we strongly support and believe in open source initiatives, we have a passion for education and movements to make learning widely accessible. Now, by joining forces, Transifex, Coursera, and all the other partners are taking a giant leap forward toward making high-quality education accessible to anyone, anywhere — regardless of what language they speak. We are excited to see where this partnership leads to!

Case Study: Connecting Fashiolista’s Global Fashion Community

txsam — Mon, 13 May 2013 11:06:00 -0400

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 of 2010, Fashiolista now boasts 1.5 million members in over 160 countries. It is one of the world’s largest fashion communities.

With a growing user base from around the world, the Fashiolista team decided to localize their website. It was time to go beyond English.

Choosing a Localization Platform

After the decision was made to offer Fashiolista in other languages, Thierry Schellenbach (Founder/CTO) and Tommaso Barbugli (Developer) began evaluating various services and tools for managing their localization process. “We found Transifex because a lot of open source packages are translated using Transifex,” says Thierry.

“In the past, we were using another translation interface. However, Transifex’s tools for integrating with our development processes made it a clear winner,” he says. The Fashiolista development team relies on the Transifex API to eliminate manual and redundant processes. “When we have new strings that need to be translated, they are automatically shared from Fashiolista’s codebase to Transifex, where our translators can access the strings and submit translations.”

Vanessa Cristão, Communications & Research Manager at Fashiolista, adds, “Not only was it important that the tool we chose would integrate with our development environment, but we wanted that tool to provide translators an interface to translate. Transifex does both.”

Fashiolista’s Translation Process

“Every time a new website feature is launched or a content page is updated, I check for new content on Transifex,” says Vanessa. “Whenever new content or strings need to be translated, I just have to send a quick email to all the translators, and it all gets done in a few days.”

Today, Fashiolista operates with just a single translator per language, all of whom are users of the site. A native Portuguese speaker, Vanessa does all of the English to Portuguese translations herself. She leveraged her personal network to find translators for other languages, such as German and Russian.

All of Fashiolista’s translators translate in the Transifex web editor. “With everything in the cloud, all our translators are using the exact same tools. They get the same user experience,” Vanessa explains. “It’s one less thing to manage.”

Before the translations are made available to Fashiolista users, Vanessa runs tests on a staging server to make sure that all the strings are translated and fit properly in the user interface. If something is not quite right, she contacts the translators and any minor adjustments are made quickly.

In the future, Vanessa plans to leverage native speakers among the Fashiolista user base to review the translated strings for accuracy.

Results

Transifex makes it possible for companies of all sizes to localize their products and go global. Even with 8 languages offered, no one at Fashiolista needs to dedicate 100% of their time managing the localization process. Vanessa says, “With Transifex I can easily manage all languages in one place. It’s very easy to see the state of all translations at the same time. It’s very practical and saves me loads of time.”

Transifex site issue

glezos — Thu, 09 May 2013 13:13:00 -0400

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 downtime, please contact me personally.

We apologize again to the users who were affected and thank you for your patience.

Dimitris
Founder & CEO

10 Rules for Painless Software Localization

glezos — Tue, 07 May 2013 10:59:00 -0400

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 place of riding your initial success through a career-full of revenue. Unless you localize.

You just groaned. Software localization is not your favorite thing. You love to build things, and translating is much less fun. Few developers are eager to localize until they hear about all of the business they are missing out. Try this on for size:

The global SaaS market is forecast to grow by more than 15% in the next year.
The United States accounted for a paltry 34% of the global revenue from iPhone apps.
The Arab gaming market is expected to triple in the next 36 months.
The largest employer in the world is the Chinese crowdsourcing agency, Zhubajie, which boasts a workforce 7.6 million strong.

Consider the social networking site, LinkedIn which heads the Forbes list of 25 Fastest Growing Tech Companies. Founded in 2006, LinkedIn is a relatively young company only available in two languages, English and Spanish, for much of its history. The site now displays content and offers customer services in 19 different languages and counting.

The story is much the same for the other 24 companies on the Forbes list.

Coincidence? We don’t believe in coincidence.

Bottomline, there is a lot of money to be made in software development right now, but most of it is global money. You need to localize your software.

Here are a few things to keep in mind:

1. Use a Continuous Localization Platform

This might sound a little self-serving coming from us, a company whose product is a Continuous Localization Platform (CLP), but seriously, you need one. Before the CLP, you had only two options: Human (great final product but slow and expensive) or robot (fast and cheap and terrible). A CLP allows you to remain in control, access real-time analytics, protect your intellectual property and get your software translated efficiently. It’s really a no brainer.

2. Always Use a Full Locale

Be as precise as possible when you localize. Different regions may speak and spell a shared languages with nuanced differences. What is a trunk to you might be a boot to someone else. You might offer a favor and they might hear favour. Your software should reflect an understanding of those differences.

3. Make Room for Strings to Grow & Shrink

Design should already be part of your most precious intellectual property. You should invest as much energy on your software looks as on how it works. As you design, keep in mind the reality that text will vary in size as you translate it.

“Repeat password” is 50% longer in German than in English; if you have not left enough space, localization will break your design. You will need a 2-pronged approach to this problem. You want to create enough elasticity to accommodate a 40% variance. This will take care of most strings in most languages, but you will also need to test early and often. Let your designers be involved in the process at every phase, so they do not experience a bottleneck of updates once the translations are complete.

4. Start with your Product Page and Description

If you are really nervous about the whole localization scene — not sure your product will have global appeal, or remain unconvinced of the business logic — then start small. Many companies have seen great sales gains resulting from the launch of a localized product page even without making changes to their software. If you decide to use your product page as a test, be sure you do it right. Comb over every single pixel of your product’s LP and every syllable in your app store description. Adjust the username in your screenshots (“Carlos” instead of “John”) change any references to location (maps, pictures, timezones) and make sure you get it right. You don’t want to fail because of poor execution and come to the (incorrect) conclusion that localization does not work.

5. Never Concatenate Strings

Sloppy amendments in CSS or HTML, qualifying one string with another as can often happen in redactive search, is a shortcut that nobody will notice until your software is localized. When you do, you will have bugs out your ears. Even the Romance languages, which are very close to one another, have subtle syntactical differences. Sometimes modifiers come before nouns, sometimes after, sometimes they become a suffix.

Instead, code the entire string together and allow your translators to put the words in the correct order for each linguistic context.

6. Include Punctuation

It is tempting to omit punctuation while you are coding, and plan to add it later. Maybe you hope to re-use the string in different contexts where it will need to be punctuated differently. Don’t.

Include punctuation in context, and create unique strings for each line of text. Even the same sequence of words, may translate differently with different punctuation. In French, for example, a colon is surrounded by spaces. If you omit the colon in your string, and try to add it later, your French interface will have a typo that your translators could have helped you avoid.

7. Pay Special Attention to Proper Names

Some languages alter the spelling and pronunciation of proper names in different contexts. Others alternate the placement of given and family names. Pay special attention to your treatment of names. It’s best to offer all three fields- first, last and username.

8. Never Hard-Code Date, Time or Currency

Time and date formats vary wildly around the world. Currency too. Java can help. Code in a universal format like ISO time and then tap an open-source library like Date.js to format for your specific location.

This can be especially in date selection tools. Estonia marks Saturday as the first day of the week, the US starts on Sunday, the UK on Monday, the Maldives on Friday. Use the jQuery UI date picker to overcome this challenge.

9. Plan for Languages that Read in Both Directions

Most languages read from left to right, but Arabic and Hebrew read from right to left. CSS and HTML provide a directional property, but they will not override a CSS element coded as “float: left” or “float: right”. If you have fixed positioning layouts, you might need to build an entirely new set of style sheets for your left-to-right products.

10. Never Trust the Browser

Yes, the browser can translate. But you shouldn’t trust it. Any extra work the browser has to execute on your app will make it slower, and nobody likes to wait. Let the browser do what it does: browse. Let the people coo about your speed. Localize. Don’t trust the browser.

Software localization can be a painful process, but it doesn’t have to be. Follow these simple rules and you can launch your software into a global marketplace without more than a little pinch. We promise.

By Dimitris Glezos

Why I hired Nico Sallembien as our VP of Engineering

glezos — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 15:11:00 -0400

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 he built its highly successful localization platform used by close to one million translators worldwide today. Before Twitter, he was at Google building their internationalization stack. And before that, he was at Ariba and Borland.

I’m ecstatic to share that Nico Sallembien has joined Transifex as our VP of Engineering.

We’ve been keeping close tabs on Nico for a while. He’s a visionary who just “gets it”. He understands the true power of localization and its possibilities if you make it work right (painless, automated, accessible, and dead easy). Nico is one of those passionate people who shines working with teams building groundbreaking technologies. And one of those guys who I am never tired of talking technology with.

#ItsGonnaBeAwesome

By Dimitris Glezos

Taggin' it and lovin' it

mpessas — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 09:19:00 -0400

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 specific phrase.

There are many use cases for tags in the editor:

You can group entries according to where they are used in the source code or the feature they are for. For instance, all marketing-related entries could be tagged accordingly, so that your translators know to pay extra attention to how they translate them.
You can give priorities to entries.
They can work as a basic workflow tool. The project managers can tag specific entries and ask their translators and reviewers to work on them.

Make sure to read more in the docs and let us know of ways this could be even more useful.

Word count change for Japanese, Chinese and Korean

sawidis — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 10:16:00 -0400

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 languages are not used the way they are used in other languages, the word count should take into account the number of symbols instead.

With today’s change, the word count for Japanese, Chinese or Korean will be calculated by multiplying half the number of symbols in your source language by the number of languages Transifex hosts translations for. If your source text consists of 50K symbols, Transifex now considers that number to be 25K.

You can find more info in our documentation.

Changes in how following projects in Transifex works

mpessas — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 05:01:00 -0400

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 when there is new content to be translated.

With the latest update we tried to make this feature much more useful to translators and overcome the limitations of the previous system.

If you want to receive updates for changes in the files of a project, you have to watch it. Every project has a link in its main page for that.

Moreover, you can choose to watch a specific language a project is translated in. The relevant link is in the main language page of the project. Keep in mind that it is not possible to watch a language for a project that does not employ teams for the translations. This is a change compared to how the feature worked before, where you were only able to watch the updates for a specific file in a specific language.

In the notification settings, you can find a list of the projects you are watching

Currently, you will receive updates whenever a new file has been added to the project, a file has been updated or a file has been deleted. You can find more in the documentation.

Let us know what you think.

Changes in notification emails

mpessas — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 10:34:00 -0400

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 and enable just those.

In addition, all emails have been revisited with respect to how clear their message was and how easy it was to react to those notifications. We tried to make sure the messages are now precise and have all the necessary information and links to Transifex for you to take an action on. In case an email was redundant, it was dropped.

Another feature of the new notifications is that Transifex now sets the List-ID header based on the project the email is for. This allows for email clients to identify all emails that are related to a certain project and group them accordingly.

Under the hood, there was a complete rewrite of the code responsible for the notifications. We now use a library that implements the observer pattern (no, not django signals), which allows us to generate notifications under more precise conditions — no more multiple emails on the same subject.

We have received in the past a few complaints about the notifications Transifex produces. We hope this update fixes those issues, although more changes are coming. In any case, let us know for any improvements or new types of notifications you might need.

Changes in key-value formats

mpessas — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 09:59:39 -0400

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 only at the identifier of the entry, to determine, whether the entry had actually changed. For instance, in PO files this is the msgid part of an entry. On the other hand, if the value (source string) of the entry had changed, Transifex would just update the source string, without any effect on the translations for that entry.

The reasoning for this behavior was that in most formats the source string is placed in and extracted from the source code; that is, the identifier for an entry is the source string itself. As a result, any changes in the source string would affect the identifiers, too.

However, there are certain formats that are used in a different way. In these cases, the source code only contains a key as a placeholder for the string instead of the string and the source string lives in a key-value like file. There are many formats that fall in this category, like Java .properties files, YML for Ruby On Rails and Joomla .ini files. The typical workflow in these cases is to never change the key in the source code, but update the source string in the source file instead (the value for that key).

For this reason, Transifex changes the way it works for this kind of formats to better suit this workflow. So, it invalidates the translations for an entry, when the source string changes, even if the identifier is still the same.

This change should not affect in any way the day-to-day operations for any project that does not want to benefit from this feature.

Translating Natural Language to Code

transifex-old — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 16:50:00 -0400

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 an important new feature in Transifex. Everyone was on a different page and we couldn’t settle on an agreement for hours. By the time we left the office, it was nearly midnight.

How many times has this happened to you? You have the perfect idea in your head — it seems so simple to you. But when you explain it to others, they just can’t see the simplicity of the code you have in mind. They insist that it will be hard to maintain and won’t scale.

We decided to fix this problem.

Introducing TurkeyCode

During a hackfest in January, somewhere up in the Greek mountains, we decided to roll up our sleeves and solve this.

We built a natural language processing engine that translates English text to code.

Product Managers, rejoice: you no longer need to convince developers to agree with your feature request. Developers, throw a party: forget about working on those sales and marketing features you don’t like.

TurkeyCode (TC) is computer-aided natural-language programming. TC uses Transifex libraries to read English text and produce programming code. We started with English as a source language with a limited vocabulary and Python as the target language.

Example run

Here is an example on how text input is translated to the Python code.

Source Output

TurkeyCode is a feature which reads text and translates it to code.

def __main__()
  class TurkeyCode(feature):

    def read(text):
      pass
            
    def translate(text):
      return code

     class text:
       pass

Whenever it reads text, TurkeyCode remembers the length of the text for future use.

To translate, TurkeyCode calls nltk to tokenize the text.

import nltk
    
def __main__()
  class TurkeyCode(feature):
    length = 0

    def read(text):
      self.length = len(text)      
      
    def translate(text):
      code = nltk.tokenize(text)
      return code

  class text:
    pass

Under the hood, TurkeyCode uses the nltk library to classify the sentences and deconstruct them to tokens. It then uses PLY to map the tokenized text to a Python construct. Type text as you normally would and a Python implementation comes out.

Combined with our computer-aided tool for translating between programming languages we announced 12 months ago, you can export this Python implementation to other programming languages such as C, Perl, or PHP.

Future plans

TurkeyCode is a brand new technology still in early development. Our roadmap for the next 6 months includes adding support for TC to our API so the prototype solution can be saved in your repository on GitHub, and supporting Spanish and Russian as source languages.

One limitation of the platform is that it requires a keyboard at the moment. Quite a few meetings in tech companies have a no-devices policy, so TurkeyCode is limited. We plan to add a speech-to-text system to the mix: you record every meeting and a daemon automatically converts what’s said into text, which is then turned into code. Within minutes, you have a prototype solution in Python.

We’ve played around with Dragonfly for speech-to-text with not-too-shabby results. We’ve started with the high-quality MXL AC404 mic, but headsets just don’t cut it at the moment.

Beta Release

Linus Torvalds said, “Talk is cheap, show me the code.” This is the future of coding. We’ve been using TurkeyCode internally for the past two months and it has already saved us dozens of hours of prototyping.

Next Tuesday, we will be launching the beta for select Transifex users. If you’re interested, please tweet this post using the button at the bottom of the page and we’ll add you to our list.

Concordance search added to the web editor

mpessas — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 09:42:00 -0400

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 translator, date of the translation, and the project the result comes from.

This way translators can search for how words or phrases have been translated in the past and re-use the same translation, ensuring a higher level of quality and consistency in the translations.

Moreover, the name of the project the result comes from and the translator and date of the translation help translators filter out translations that are no longer relevant.

On the other hand, the suggestions feature shows the translator the best translations for the whole segment.

To use the concordance search, you can either press the ‘c’ key or click on the respective icon in the suggestions tab. A panel will appear, where you can enter the word or phrase to search for and the respective results.

You can find more details in our support center.

Case Study: Helping translation agency e2f optimize their business

txsam — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 12:16:00 -0400

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 survive.

So e2f moved out of their comfort zone and adopted new technology. They replaced their aging in-house system developed in 2004 with a modern translation management automation system connected to Transifex through our API. Their new system is both advanced and distinct from what most agencies use.

Clients can visit e2f’s website, upload source files, and select what languages he or she wants the files translated to. Once the order is submitted, a project is automatically created in Transifex and e2f translators can start working. And if a client wants to see the progress of the translations, it’s constantly updated on the e2f website via the Transifex API. It’s a level of transparency rarely provided by agencies.

e2f’s new translation management system has significantly cut down on a number of manual processes and reduced turnaround times. It also allows them to take on more projects of all sizes.

And what about reducing their production costs? According to Michel Lopez, the founder and CEO of e2f, they expect their initial infrastructure costs to be lowered by over 15% minimum. That’s sweet music to our ears.

To learn more about this story, check out the new case study from e2f.

P.S. We love the folks at e2f. Please do get in touch with them if you’re looking for some quality translations, especially for French, German, Spanish, or Italian.

Infographics are pretty neat. They make complex information...

txsam — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 17:05:00 -0400

Infographics are pretty neat. They make complex information easy to understand. They’re fun too.

So we created our own infographic about localization. In it, you can learn about the importance of localization and the various ways you can approach it. For example, did you know that 52.7% of internet users say obtaining information in their own language is more than price?

Go here to see the full infographic. Let us know what you think and be sure to share it!

By Samuel Chan

Part of the (Startup) Pack

txsam — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 20:10:24 -0500

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 tools and services as part of the Pack!

When this opportunity arose, we were thrilled. We strongly believe in startups and this is a perfect opportunity to support our fellow startups. As they endeavor to solve challenging problems and better the world with innovative technology, we want to enable them to make their products available around the globe.

For the 250 startups that will receive a pack this time around, they’ll get 5 months access to Transifex’s Plus Plan – good for the translating up to 50,000 words.

Companies like Amazon, GitHub, New Relic, and Twilio have signed on as well and we’re proud and delighted to be in such good company. Applications for Startup Pack are only open for 10 days, so apply before you miss out!

Check out the TechCrunch article as well.

Meet our new partner, Gengo

kbairak — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 08:02:00 -0500

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, you’ll be able to order translations from within Transifex. Once you pick the language(s) you want to have your app translated to (there are 31 to choose from!), the content will be automatically sent to their translators. Before you know it, the completed translations will appear right inside your project in Transifex. To say the least, it’s a bit magical!

Transifex will continue to manage your content while Gengo’s translators speedily bring you high quality translations. What’s not to like?

If you’re interested, you can access the translation order form in your dashboard on Transifex and place your first order for projects you own.

Happy localizing!

Nikos Vassiliou is a Transifexian

transifex-old — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 19:42:00 -0500

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 clusters to mobile devices and web browsers.

In his spare time, he likes to get away from the fuss of the city on his motorcycle, play video games and hack some more code. He declares himself a science fiction addict, as he believes it can be the driving force behind the design of great new products.