Hey folks,

I just finished the first draft of a major refactor of Open Translate, a community translation script I wrote a few years back to manage the translation files for Form Tools. You can see the fruits of this on the Form Tools translation site right now:
http://translations.formtools.org/

You’ll notice that there are around 30 completed translations.

Here’s what’s changed:

• Open Translate now uses Google Translate to provide a base set of auto-translations for each language.
• Open Translate now supports a rather beautiful versioning system for the data. This I’m rather pleased with. :) When I come out with Form Tools version 2.0.1, it will no doubt contain added, updated and deleted text to be translated. No problem! I can just create a new branch from within Open Translate. That branch will then inherit all the existing data and translations made up to that point. Versions are a tree structure: any version can inherit the data from one and only parent. The beautiful thing is that (a) there’s zero database redundancy and (b) if you’re translating (or reviewing) something in version 1.5 that hasn’t changed since 1.0, your work will be inherited by all versions that use the data. Neat, hey? Every hour, all updated versions-languages are automatically exported to the Form Tools site for downloading by the end user.
• I significantly simplified a lot of the database for features that I originally thought would be useful, but didn’t turn out to be. For example, languages are now tied to projects rather than individual versions, as are data categories.
• Translators can now sign themselves up for the project via the Form Tools site rather than manually contacting me.

Anyway, fun day. Should be interesting to see how things go from here on out.

- Ben

Hey folks,

Here’s what I’ll be working on in the coming weeks, and why it may look like not much is happening Form Tools-wise… All the following features relate to Open Translate, Form Tools’ translation management script.

1. Google Translate

In the last couple of years Google has come out a number of extremely cool stuff relating for translation, including the Google Translate API which allows developers to translate content via their own scripts. For the foreseeable future, automated translation of text is never going to be as solid as that done by a real translator, but it’s a good start. My plan is integrate Google Translate API with Open Translate to provide a base translation of all languages that they offer. These translations will then be open for other translators to review and improve.

Depending on the quality of the translations, this should significantly reduce the amount of work for translators as well as provide an initial – albeit bug-laden – translation file for many languages that haven’t been tackled yet. These languages will then be bundled with the main download file so that people can choose their language right in the installation script. To encourage better translations for all of us, I’ll be storing the Reliability Percentage (see: translations.formtools.org) of each translation in the corresponding translation file. Until that percentage is > 90% (or something), I’ll include a link in the admin UI to encourage non-English speaking users to help translate their language.

2. Data Versioning

So… this is a fun one! A little backstory first. I wrote Open Translate (opentranslate.org) a couple of years ago to properly handle community translations, and up until now it’s held up pretty well. But now that Form Tools 2 is out of Beta, I need to complete a feature that I spec’d out but never completed: versioning. The text that needs to be translated for Form Tools 2.0.0 is now FIXED, I won’t be modifying it. This is going to be the case for all “final” releases from now on. You’ll be able to download a translation file for whatever version you’re using. [I HATE Wordpress's annoying "You're version is out of date! Upgrade now!" line that appears at the top of the screen every few weeks to persuade people to upgrade. I won't ever do that. You can stay on v2.0.0 for years to come if you want, and I won't bug you. Promise. :) ]

So anyway, the goal is to allow translators to be able to pick a version that they want to translate – whatever version of the script is relevant for them.

Now here’s the catch: I don’t want to duplicate any text + translations for each version (2.0.1, 2.0.2 etc). I want all of them to share the same text + translations as much as possible to minimize the amount of work done (one of the golden rules of software development is duplication == bad!) Also, if a user is running 2.1.8 and translates some text that’s been unchanged & untranslated since 2.0.0, I want that translation to be automatically added to ALL versions from 2.0.0 onwards.

As you can imagine, this is getting complicated! Neat problem, huh?

My original plan was to base Open Translate entirely on SVN (Subversion), which so that all translations and data were versioned. Subversion is just that: it’s a versioning tool that keeps a repository of all data and offers ways to slice and dice the information depending on what you need. In fact, this is the script that powers the Form Tools upgrade mechanism and helps generate the custom zipfiles containing whatever files have changed since your last version. It’s used on this site to keeps a giant database of all Form Tools files: themes, modules, API and Core.

Despite its many virtues, after much hemming and hawing I decided against using it for Open Translate. Partly for technical reasons that I won’t go into, but also partly because Open Translate would still have needed a duplicate database of the data and translations o allow for quick searching and access of the data via a web-based UI.

So…. long story is that I’ll now be adding in versioning support to Open Translate. I have it all sketched out and it’s a thing of beauty.

3. Module Translations

This is something I’ve been hopelessly delinquent about. Once the above two are complete I’ll be adding the option for modules to be translated as well. Right now all of them have a single, English language file. Weak!

And that’s all folks.

- Ben

The first draft of my company site is finished, so check it out! It’s all Ajax-driven right now, without any non-JS fallback, but in time I’ll add the static HTML option.

Right now the site is nothing much more than a catalog of my main scripts, but in time I’ll expand it to include my other scripts – as well as a location for future releases. I’ve been working on a invoice generation script which I will be releasing there in the next couple of months.

Next, I’ll be re-branding my other scripts under the company name.

Visit the Black Sheep Web Software website.

Just brushing up my résumé… a few more screenshots!

Today was my first day where I was finally settled in Saskatoon, so I was able to catch up on some emails and a little work. I think I’ll enjoy it here, albeit for a mere 9 months. I was undisturbed the entire day and even got a little contract work done. Things should be peaceful in this place.
But here’s the really exciting news…

Form Tools 1.5.0 Private Beta Released! (Language Packs)

Now available! Unlike previous Private Beta versions, I’m only making this available to translators who wish to volunteer to translate the UI. This version represents a major refactoring of the code to support multiple languages.

If you’d like to help translate, send me an email here. So far I’ve had people volunteer for Dutch, Portuguese, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Spanish, Italian, French, Farsi (Persian), German and Polish. A good start for testing the software.

Open Translate Beta Released!

I’ve finally opened the doors to a handful of translators who will use it to translate Form Tools. It’s VERY basic right now, and missing a front-end. This has been a loooong project, and rather than put it off even longer I decided to push it live.

It’s pretty cool, actually. Other than for fixing bugs, I could walk away from it if need be: all translations made through opentranslate.org are automatically zipped up and exported every hour to the Form Tools site for download by the Form Tools beta testers. In theory, the translation component of Form Tools will be entirely self-managed by the translators themselves. I can worry about other things!

A very satisfying day indeed.

In the upcoming month we’ll be releasing a new Private Beta of Form Tools featuring (drum roll, please)… multiple language support! All aspects of the Form Tools UI are now localized – display text, notifications, confirmations, error messages and even dates.

In preparation for this exciting event (well, I find it exciting!), if anyone would be interested in helping translate Form Tools to their native language – or even just help review existing translations – please drop me a line at ben.keen@gmail.com with your name and language you speak. Once things are ready I’ll set you up a user account and provide further instructions.

Andrew Jakubowski and I have moved Open Translate to a dedicated server, and we’re just putting the finishing touches on the translator pages.

Looking forward to hearing from you!