Transifex expands its offerings

Transifex, the web-based collaborative string translation hub, has rolled out a major update. There are several new tools and features aimed at developers and translation teams, but the most fundamental change is that the project is now offering paid accounts for those who wish to work on closed-source projects—providing funding that will help further development of the project.

Development projects can link Transifex to their existing version control system (VCS), and Transifex will pull in and parse supported file types that contain user-visible strings. On the Transifex site, translators can start language-specific translation efforts, entering translations for each string and (if the project managers allow it) pushing the results back to the original VCS. Project managers can leave their projects relatively free-form, or set up more structured translation teams, with approval required to check changes back in.

We covered Transifex in 2009, and the service has improved considerably since that time. The 1.0 release in 2010 brought the largest change set, adopting an internal storage engine that is agnostic to the upstream VCS used by the project. The Transifex server retrieves files over HTTP, so the upstream files to be translated must be publicly accessible in raw form.

Once files are fetched, the server parses the file, saving the original version as a template with its initial strings designated as the "source language." Translators are presented with the source language strings, and can enter their translated versions in a web-based editor — which was also new in 1.0. When changes are sent back to the upstream VCS, the Transifex server uses the template as a model, inserting the new strings where appropriate, and modifying the file metadata to indicate new language support and translator identities.

1.1 features

This level of automation requires building support for specific VCSes and new importer/exporter models for each new file type added. All of the major VCSes are supported now, but the number of file formats supported is still growing. The new 1.1 release, which landed in June 2011 — although the public Transifex.net server was not updated at that time — includes several new ones, most notably Freedesktop.org .desktop launcher files and the XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF).

Most of the supported formats are for software development, such as .po and .pot files for Gettext, .strings files for Mac OS X and iOS, .resx for Windows, and the various formats for Android, Java, and Qt applications. It is surprising to some, but Transifex supports file formats designed for other purposes as well. Support for XHTML, PHP arrays, and YAML enables projects to work on translation of web content, and support for the .srt, .sub, and .sbv media subtitle formats enable video caption translations.

For translators, the biggest new feature of Transifex 1.1 is "translation memory." This is a database of other translations which can be used for reference when editing a new string. Older translations from the specific project are available as a sort of local phrasebook, but the more interesting development is that the translations of other projects are accessible as suggestions, too. That could be particularly helpful when starting out a new project — if there are several possibilities for an uncommon term, it would be useful to see what other projects chose. Transifex presents the translations of similar text culled from among the other hosted projects.

Picky or secretive project managers can disable the cross-project sharing feature, but still access previously-used suggestions from the individual project. A primitive version of this feature was available in Transifex 1.0, but it required making an explicit search query; the automatic suggestions are simpler to use. A spell-checker is also now built into the web-based editor, which is especially important because it auto-saves translation work.

Two new features are available from the project manager side of the interface. First, developers can enter comments on the translatable resources directly within the Transifex web editor. Those comments could include explanatory notes on specific terms, or general instructions for translators.

A bit more interesting is the "pseudo-file" auto-generation feature. Transifex can create translation files in a dummy language, which a developer can then run and use to spot any strings that somehow escaped into the interface without being marked for translation. This type of pseudo-file is called the "Dot language," which substitutes a period for every original character. There is also an option that inserts random characters into the file, which Transifex creator Dimitris Glezos said could prove useful in testing UI layouts.

#: addons/cla/handlers.py:58
msgid "License text"
msgstr "Lïקïcéקénséקé téקéxt"

By "tall characters" Glezos primarily seems to mean accented letters, which are uncommon in English, the source language of most software projects. Extra-long and extra-tall strings have the potential to push interface widgets, menus, and column text out of vertical and horizontal alignment — a problem that can be difficult to test for without changing languages. Of course, a UI that breaks or becomes mis-aligned when the strings are too short is also a possibility, but in most cases the Dot language option would reveal those problems.

Finally, Transifex has also added an "Explore" interface to the site itself, which lets visitors browse featured and active projects, in order to foster community development. Right now, the explore feature highlights only the most-active and largest projects on the site. If encouraging new translators to join is part of the goal, hopefully other views will follow — such as which projects or languages are most in need of help. The individual project pages currently display this information, showing the completion-percentage for each language.

Freemium blend

Transifex was born out of Glezos's efforts to improve translation in the Fedora project, and the emphasis of the service is still squarely on open source projects. But 1.1 offers developers the ability to connect private and proprietary projects to the web service.

There are multiple pricing plans to choose from, which vary in the number of contributors and the number of source words that are allowed in private or proprietary projects. Free accounts can connect to a total of two users and amass 2,000 source words. The 30-Euro-per-month plan ups the numbers to five users and 10,000 words, and the 300-Euro plan to 20 users and 50,000 words. The 300-Euro plan also includes a distinct yourproject.transifex.net subdomain, and priority ticket and telephone support. All of the plans, free and premium, can host an unlimited number of open source projects, with no limits on the number of user accounts associated or the size of the content.

Placing premium-based restrictions on the number of user accounts and the number of words associated with private/proprietary projects seems like an odd choice — after all, one would have to count the total number of words in the strings of a project, which may be hard to predict if it is still in development. But then again, the Transifex server software is available under the GPLv2, so any entity interested in maintaining a large, closed translation effort could simply install the code on its own private server.

In the blog announcement heralding the arrival of 1.1, Transifex noted that in years past, self-hosting has been the project's answer when someone asked about running a private server. It can now offer an alternative, which parent company Indifex indicates will be used to fund further work on the main Transifex code base.

Last words

Compared to the Rosetta online translation editor offered by Launchpad, Transifex appears to be evolving at a faster pace. Rosetta supports a smaller set of of file formats (just Gettext and Mozilla .xpi at the moment), although Rosetta has supported translation suggestions based on other projects' strings for several years, and supports maintaining multiple translation efforts for concurrent branches of the same project. Unless I have missed it in the interface, that last feature is not yet supported in Transifex.

It will be interesting to watch how the tiered, freemium price plans affect Transifex's development. Paid users on high-end plans get guaranteed two-day turnaround of support tickets; the crux will be whether that includes feature requests as well as bugs. The Enterprise Edition already supports more file formats and "performance optimizations".

Although Indifex says that revenue from the paid plans will be funneled back into the development of Transifex, we have all seen examples in the past where paid or "enterprise" users either begin to drive the development of new features, or get access to the new features before they are available to the free service or source code repository. Development is already underway for the next Transifex release, of course; given the large number of open source projects that now depend on it, hopefully it will be able to avoid the pitfalls of diverging free/paid interests.