After a 2-month private beta and a 2-month public beta, we are proud to announce that Translation.io is now officially launched (as of January 2015).

We warmly thank all the beta testers for their useful feedback: it really helped us improve our tool! Thanks to you all.

A few figures about the last few months:

• 115 carefully targeted users
• 71 projects
• 124,106 segments synced (61,082 GetText, 63,024 YAML)
• 65,050 segments translated
• 7 versions of the 'translation' gem
• 44 different target languages

We're glad to see that our project met a positive and enthusiastic welcome in the small community of developers around us. We will now start spreading the word and presenting our tool more largely in the Ruby on Rails community.

But we won't stop at that! We will continue developing the tool to improve the interface while making sure that it remains simple and user-friendly.

Stay tuned for the next updates!

If you have ever watched a professional translator work with his/her favorite translation software, surely you will have been impressed by the speed with which he/she jumps from one segment to another when translating. Sometimes you may have seen partial translations of segments suddenly appear on the screen, for the translator to adapt them to the context. You may even have seen segments get fully translated in a split second.

Amanzingly, while his/her translation work was progressing at a rapid pace, you noticed that the translator never reached for the mouse or trackpad...

As in many other computer-aided professions, translators make intensive use of several keyboard shortcuts to speed up their work and, consequently, increase their profitability. Developers who use VI, Emacs or Sublime Text won't deny the importance of keyboard shortcuts in their everyday (work) lives.

That's why we paid a special attention to keyboard shortcuts in our translation interface, so as to make the translators' lives easier and spare them from having to reach for the mouse. Here are the different, useful shortcuts:

You'll notice that CTRL + , CTRL + and TAB are undoubtedly the most important shortcuts, but don't underestimate the importance of the translation memory using CTRL + NUMBER.

If you can't remember one of the shortcuts while you are translating, just click on this icon.

We hope that these keyboard shortcuts will help you work faster and with less pain.

Ahoy mateys,

As planned, our team went to ArrrrCamp 2014 in Ghent for the opening of Translation.io's public beta.

One thing we did not mention, though, is that we were their main sponsor... unintentionally! Indeed, no one else opted for the same level of sponsorship as we did, and we thus became their biggest sponsor. Some of the participants may have thought that we were largely financing the conference.

The organizers graciously gave us the opportunity to present our product during a 5-minute lightning talk scheduled right before one of the wonderful presentations. As stressful as it may be, we were delighted to be able to pitch Translation.io to all 250 participants at once!

Here are the slides we had prepared:

The organizers had also arranged a place for us to display our flyers, roll-up banners, and all our branded gift mugs. Some people seemed interested by our product and very quickly understood the benefit of using GetText (for those who were still to convince).

Full Disclosure

The conversation rate from our presence at ArrrrCamp was not as successful as we had hoped, with only a few new registrations, but we suppose that few developers actually had an urgent need to translate an application right at that moment. Since the feedback we received was very positive, we hope the participants will remember our product when they'll be in need of an efficient way to translate an application.

Ultimately, we believe we have gained "karma" among the community, so we have that going for us, which is nice. What's more, providing support to a conference as cool and fun as ArrrrCamp is already a success in itself. Now we'll have to get back to work on our web marketing strategy. Though not as fun as meeting people at conferences, it's actually a more effective way to reach future beta testers and clients with a much more satisfying conversion rate.

Since August 12th, the service has been in private beta with the people who had signed up and the collaborators they invited.

It has been two very constructive months! We got a lot of great and valuable feedback from 50+ new users around the world, who created 30+ projects.

Your Feedback

The overall feedback is very positive: people love the interface and how easy it is to integrate the gem in an existing app.

Some of them were already using a GetText-based workflow, while others just discovered it. Most projects still use YAML files, but we are happy to see there is a real interest in an easy GetText solution for Rails.

It was interesting to see that many projects use HAML or SLIM. Thanks to our beta-testers, we significantly improved the support of these two markup languages.

Production Use

Some projects have successfully switched to our solution already, and we are very happy about it!

We would also be glad to help you with the setup of the translation process in your existing app.

What's Next ?

Every user on the private beta will get free access until July 2015 (6 months free).

Today marks the start of the public beta! And every user on the public beta will get free access until April 2015 (3 months free).

The Live Release is scheduled for January 1st.

During the private beta, we asked our users to give us feedback about our application. And one of the feedback was something like :

Your application sounds great, but there’s no chance I’m going to sign up over an unencrypted connection.

And this user was absolutely right. We had planned to configure HTTPS... someday. But your security is important right now!

So, the right thing has been done, and now Translation.io uses HTTPS by default.

This applies to both web pages and API calls.

The good news, for us, is that Google uses HTTPS as a ranking signal with a small indexation boost. So it's a typical win-win situation!