Transposh - Breaking language barriers

The transposh.org wordpress plugin showcase and support site

Version 1.0.9.5 – Fighting the code rot

by 10 Comments

After 16 years of operation and more than two years without a new release, our plugin encountered a widespread challenge known as code rot. This issue arises when functionality degrades over time—even without changes to the plugin’s code—due to external factors. New WordPress releases, updated PHP versions, and shifts in translation services can disrupt carefully designed features.

In version 1.0.9.5, we’ve tackled these challenges, with a primary focus on the translation engines. We removed outdated code and introduced new implementations to restore support for Yandex and Baidu translation services, which had stopped working in recent years. These updates ensure that the translation features are fully operational once again. Additionally, we’ve expanded language support to include new languages added to these translation services over time.

This release reflects our dedication to keeping the plugin reliable and effective, adapting to the evolving landscape of technologies and services.

We’ve introduced a new widget that utilizes standard flag emojis, which have been incorporated into the emoji set over the years. This update simplifies the widget’s code significantly, while also enabling easy customization of the flags to meet your specific needs.

You can check out this new widget in action on our site, where we’ve added a clever CSS trick that makes the current language icon twice as large as the others, achieved with just the following two lines of code!
.transposh_flags{font-size:22px}
.tr_active{font-size:44px; float:left}

We hope you enjoy this new version!

Version 0.8.2 – 3 years, 66 languages, 1 wordpress

by 21 Comments

I said 3 candles on that cake!

It has been three years (and three days, and thirty three hours) since the first version of Transposh plugin has been aired on the wordpress.org plugin repository.

Time surely flies.

This has been the first leap year (29th February) and a real leap year for Transposh. The plugin has been downloaded from the repository over 50,000 times this year and has made a steady growth of features and total number of languages supported. And today with the addition of Hmong Daw we are the first plugin to support a total number of 66 languages.

This was a really interesting (as in, have an interesting life) year for the automatic translation industry and plugins, where Google has nearly dropped their API support (only to switch to a pay model) while Bing imposed new limits. Transposh has successfully overcame those changes, while other plugins did not survive.

What does the future holds for Transposh? We are slowly boiling some new stuff, working on our vision to improve website translation, when things will be ready – they will be out. Meanwhile, your continued support is important to us, sometimes a simple email with “your plugin is great” drives us to continue. So if you believe we are doing well, drop us a line, if you think we should improve things, drop us a note, and if you think that we suck, we fail to understand why you have read this message up to this point 😉

Wishing ourselves a great 4th year, maybe it will end with a bigger cake 🙂

 

Version 0.7.5 – The longest day ++

by 23 Comments

by voobie http://www.flickr.com/photos/vinish/960942349/
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.

 

Version 0.7.4 – The springy version

by 8 Comments

By Peter Kaminski http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterkaminski/66876135/
Anybody guess what the spring stands for?

This release comes in a bit late on our schedule. But it already broke our single day download record by crossing the 500 mark.

This release although small in nature does have some nice additions.

First, the default language set in Transposh now overrides the one that is set in the WP_LANG constant, this allows a WordPress MU installation in which every site can be managed in a different language on the backend. A feature which I enjoyed by finally allowing my kid to have his own personal blog in a language he can manage.

We have added a tp shortcode that enables to output the current transposh language, although it might not sound like much, this small additions allows displaying different images for different languages, you can read about it here.

An addition of a few constants in our parser code, now allow coders (not users) to change our parser behavior to break phrases on larger chunks, see the top of our parser.php for documentation.

More changes and bug crashing include:

  • Iframes included inside pages will now attempt to include proper language
  • Fixed bug with using the only=”y” parameter of the tp shortcode which made incorrect detections of source language further in parsing
  • Added German translation by Jenny Beelens from professionaltranslation.com

Enjoy this version, tell your friends about it, don’t tell your enemies anything, consult with your lawyers if you really want to and don’t forget the importance of your family.

PS: We know about the scheduled Google Translate API deprecation and the plugin will still work, details will be uncovered in future versions.

Version 0.7.3 – Shortcodes support

by 55 Comments

Today we have released version 0.7.3 which adds support for shortcodes inside wordpress posts, this can be used to do some neat stuff and for which we have created the video above, so if you have five minutes free and nothing better to do, just watch the video. Otherwise we would recommand reading the documentation at http://trac.transposh.org/wiki/ShortCodes.

Some more bug fixes were added to this release, mainly reducing the load (and duplications) that bots might create on edit pages, and eliminate unneeded session files for bots.

Enjoy this version!