Google Translate Blog: March 2012

Google Translate Blog

The official source for news on Google's translation technologies

Localize your apps and content more easily -- new formats in Translator Toolkit

Friday, March 30, 2012

At Google, we put a lot of energy into helping localize the world’s information to make it more useful to more people. It’s not just about localizing our own products -- we want to provide tools that make it easy for translators and developers around the world to localize their own apps and content. Google Translator Toolkit is our online translation tool for amateur and professional translators -- it’s built on Google Translate and supports more than 100,000 language pairs.

This week, the Translator Toolkit team has launched support for four new translation-related file formats:

Android Resource (.xml)

Application Resource Bundle (.arb)

Chrome Extension (.json)

GNU gettext-based (.po)

With these new file formats, you can use Translator Toolkit to localize your apps and other products and content much more quickly and easily.

For example, to translate your Android application, go into the res/values directory and upload strings.xml into Translator Toolkit -- Translator Toolkit will now automatically translate it. You can then share your translations with amateur or professional translators, who can localize the text using Translator Toolkit’s WYSIWYG online editor.

When you’re finished, you can export your translated application and store it in a locale-specific directory in Android. Voilà -- easy localization! 翻译起来太方便了!

In addition, we’ve made the Translator Toolkit interface more intuitive for these new file formats so users can translate faster and more accurately. For example, you can turn on ‘Customized colors’ so translators can annotate the edited segments, ‘Number of characters in the segment’ to make sure the text doesn’t run too long (very important for mobile devices), and ‘Synchronized scrolling’ so you can scroll the original and translated text at the same time, which makes navigation much easier.

With these new file formats and UI features, along with the file formats we already support (.aea, .srt, .html), we hope Translator Toolkit can help you reach more users around the world.When you’re ready, give Google Translator Toolkit a try and suggest any improvements you’d like to see so we can work on making it even better. Posted by Chris Yang, Product Manager, and Haidong Shao, Software Engineer, Translator Toolkit

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Using labels in Translator Toolkit

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Google Translator Toolkit, an online translation tool built on Google Translate, greatly simplifies the translation workflow through its WYSIWYG editor, real-time collaboration and translation management system in the cloud. As amateur translators, we often use Translator Toolkit for projects like translating Wikipedia articles or editing subtitle files for YouTube videos. However, as we work on more and more projects at once, we’ve found we want more powerful ways to organize our Translator Toolkit documents.

So we’re adding labels in Translator Toolkit. We’ve updated them this week, and we thought you’d enjoy a peek at the method to our madness.

With labels, you can organize your Translator Toolkit documents into any categories you define yourself -- ‘high priority,’ ‘wikipedia,’ ‘work,’ ‘later,’ etc. -- and in any combination (the beauty of labels is that they can overlap, so one document might be both ‘work’ and ‘high priority’).

To put a label on a Translator Toolkit document, just select the file and then click ‘Label’ to apply an existing label (or labels). You can also create a new label.

To access all the documents with a given label (or labels), navigate to ‘My labels’ on the left side and choose the labels you’re interested in.

Labels are just one way to make it easier to access and organize your Translator Toolkit documents. Hopefully these changes help you manage more complex projects -- please let us know if you have any feedback. Posted by Chenjun Wu, Software Engineer, and Chris Yang, Product Manager, Translator Toolkit