Support for 5 more Indic languages

One day after summer has officially begun in the northern hemisphere, we are proud to present version 0.7.5 of our plugin. This version adds support for the new languages that were announced as supported today by Google Translate - Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu.

Before rushing to add those languages to your blog, please be reminded that those languages use an ajax proxy in order to work correctly, which means that they create a load on your server upon the first encounter with a new translation string (forcing it to fetch the translation from Google). So the choice is yours, but you have been notified…

Further more this version adds the option not to override the default locale with Transposh’s default language, this behavior (new on 0.7.4) allowed MU users to have admin pages in their language, but on the other hand annoyed users that wanted to manage the site in a language different than their default, so now this is configurable.

We have also improved the translation UI, the next and previous buttons now save changes done, and the dialog will not be re-centered upon clicking these buttons.

We hope you’ll enjoy this version.

The next major version release of Transposh is here, and to celebrate the occasion we have created a short video (about 11 minutes) . Introducing the new features available in the new version. You are more than welcomed to watch the video and nominate it to the next academy award prize for translation plugin update movies.

The first thing you will notice in the newer version is the major update to the user interface, we have added a couple of highly requested features to the interface such as next/previous buttons, approval of automated translations and finding phrases that are translated. Another interesting feature that we added is the ability for a translator to see the original phrase in a different language if it was already translated to said language manually, so assuming you have a Hebrew blog which you translated to English, a translator may be able to translate your site from English to another language, which might be easier for him. I want to thank Hanan for originally asking for this feature. It is also possible now to remove translations from the history dialog, which is a step in the direction of working on stricter control on translation quality.

The interface is also sleeker, with nicer ui that is also localizable and themable, you can set the theme in the widget settings, and a good place to get a grip on how it will look is themeroller. If you want to help us by translating the interface to your language and getting the credits for it, please let us know by using the contact us option above.

Topping this revision up is a virtual keyboard support using code from http://www.greywyvern.com/code/javascript/keyboard, which is still broken on IE, but will work on other browsers.

Matt and Me

This time we are joined by nobody else than Matt Mullenweg, the creator of the WordPress platform.

In the following completely fake interview, Matt will help us all understand what is new in 0.6.4:

Ofer: Hello Matt, how are you today?
Matt: I have never been so excited about a point 0.01 release of a plugin before!
Ofer: Why is that?
Matt: I think that you are finally getting the spirit of wordpress in this release
Ofer: Am I?
Matt: Yes, you are finally integrating with the platform instead of hacking around it, I really like the fact that you finally took the time and made your plugin interface and administration pages translatable, and since you are that good, you get a free blog!
Ofer: Gee, thanks! now how will I get other people to make translations of my plugin?
Matt: Just ask your users to do that, I am sure you’ll give them credit.
Ofer: Tell them the whole thing about poedit and stuff?
Matt: Come on, as I am always saying, there’s a plugin for that! And you should probably know since you translated it yourself and contributed some minor fixes.
Ofer: You mean codestyling localization?
Matt: Yes, that’s the one, anyone can use it. But I have a question for you
Ofer: For me?
Matt: Yes, why didn’t you use Transposh for doing that?
Ofer: Didn’t really see the reason, as there’s already a great plugin for it, why replicate?
Matt: I see that you are finally getting it.
Ofer: Getting what?
Matt: The spirit of wordpress, sharing, caring, open source, and free love.
Ofer: I sure hope so, thank you so much for being with us.
Matt: Thank you, next time, please interview me on a major feature, if I had to do fake interviews for every minor plugin release in wordpress, I’ll never have free time to actually improve wordpress and come to wordcamps.
Ofer: Will take notice, thanks again!

Well, thanks Matt for joining us, some features also added to this version is the Latin translation added (with google translation support), three new languages added to Bing translate. The ability to disable the gettext integration where it causes problems, with some other fixes.

As always – we hope you will enjoy this version

was fast but now faster

This version is a major release, and there is lots of new stuff in this release. so lets get over the list of items

• Now there is support for auto batch translations which makes translations faster and improves user experience, previously Transposh has to load scripts from the various auto translation backends and then it would iterate on the phrases one by one to get translations, now those are grouped together for reducing the numbers of requests made, the fact that no external scripts are loading reduces complexity and improves speed.
• MSN (bing) translator does no longer require a key, as they have upgrades their API and switched to using an application key, you can now just select the default translation engine at will, if this engine is not available for that language – Transposh will resort to using the other one.
• Transposh Google Proxy is now included to enable translation for Alpha level languages from Google (with 5 new languages supported – Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Georgian and Urdu) – this proxy is located inside the plugin and redirects requests to google translate from your server allowing the script to use them. This process is slow – it increases the load on your server – and is generally not very recommended, and will be eliminated as soon as Google releases those languages to general consumption. But if you have the urgent need to translate your site to the Azeri people, at least you can do that.
• The Transposh logo and backlink can now be removed from the widget, if you choose this option – Transposh will attempt to make some money of existing ad space on your translated pages only, this money will help us in our development effort, if you don’t want to lose any money from your ads, just keep the link. The terms are readable here.
• The translate all button was also revamped, and should be much faster using batching.

The usual share of bug fixes is here, and I would like to thank Rogelio and Marko for their insightful comments and contribution to fixing those bugs. An attempt was made at the plugin header error, but as we can’t reproduce it we don’t know if it works, so crossing our fingers. If this release is badly broken for you, please report this at the comments here, create tickets for us in our trac. Bug us on our twitter account or our facebook page or by calling our cell phones, preferably at 3 am. You can always revert to the previous version, we are not offended.

We hope you’ll enjoy this version.

We hope you’ll enjoy this one as much as we do.

After a short debate we have decided to give Yiddish the european union flag because of two reasons, one – the language originated there, not in any specific country and second – the flag does not stand for any specific country in a similar way to the language which can not be connected to any country. If anyone has better suggestions, we are open to hear them.

This release also follows a few weeks of silence, in which we have been quietly thinking and discussing new features, which we hope we’ll be able to release soon, any help and feedback will not only be appreciated but will also help us deliver a better product.