Web Translate It - Perfect fit for Web 2.0 translations

www.webtranslateit.com

This is the name of a cool web 2.0 service made by Édouard Brière and his company Atelier Convivialité. Here comes a introductory review of the tool.

"Web Translate It is a web-based computer-aided translation tool to collaboratively translate software."

...and that's what we  do with it on a daily basis. WTI (the abbreviation we internally use for it) is an online editor created to bring together all parts of a software translation process: translators, proofreaders, project managers and programmers. This service offers nice communication tools and a handy interface for translators and project managers to get things done fast and with high quality.

We know Édouard since the Last.fm project where he was our technical counter part to deal with updates and interface requirements for a 14-language translation process. After he left Last.fm we contacted Édouard to ask him if he would be able to build an editor for iBotanika and then he offered an editor as an independent web service. Well, no need to say that we loved his idea ;-). This was less than one year ago and today we have a fully functional web service, which by far has exceeded our expectations.

So how does it work?
All you need to do is to sign up for an account and choose one of the 5 different monthly subscription plans. One of them is totally free for small projects. The size of your project(s) will determine the number of translatable text strings and the plan you should choose.

Translation interface

Once you have created your account you can start uploading your first project, meaning you upload your source files to WTI, select a master language, add target languages and invite your collaborators to the project.

Édouard has done a great job in adding several file formats to the software, so most of today's web services should be able to work with it.

WTI has several user roles with different permissions. The account holder has access to everything including company and billing details. Managers can upload or download files, edit every language, add other collaborators and get statistics on the project. The translator/proofreader accounts are restricted to the language they are assigned to and can edit strings, only.

Thanks to Édouard's great support, WTI has been receiving many useful functionalities that make our daily work much easier and enable translators to work with features they know from offline editors. Here are some highlights:

• Workflow automation: that means once a translator has submitted a translation to the editor, WTI can be programmed to sync the language files and the translations get instantly displayed online. This enables translators and reviewers to check their translations in context by themselves till they get everything perfect. 
• Search options
• Terminology Database
• Translation Memory
• Comment and suggestions filds, etc.

All information about the interface and the way the system works can be found in the Documentation site.

We highly recommend WTI as an underlying software solution to deal with dynamic translations processes. Together with a localization expert team the turnaround time to get your project international in a high-quality manner is very much reduced.

Take a look yourself at www.webtranslateit.com
Édouard's blog can be found here: http://blog.webtranslateit.com/