Translation Management Improvements for 1000+ Projects

Update 29/11 10pm UTC: Transifex.com is now being upgraded. We’ve disabled some of the features to ensure data integrity. We’ll bring everything up and running once the upgrade finishes and we make sure everything is working perfectly!

Ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seat belts. The airplane is about to take off!

On November 29 we’ll be issuing a major upgrade to Transifex.com. This will affect all 1000 projects and will bring a bunch of improvements to a number of elements on the web application.

What’s up?

A few months ago, we’ve upgraded Transifex to the new ‘Mojo’ 0.9 release. This brought some exciting new features, like shared teams across projects and addons. In the release announcement we also mentioned this:

Mojo also lays the groundwork for the next major release, Transifex 1.0,
which will include some huge changes (stay tuned!).

So. The past months we’ve been working hard in bringing a really big upgrade to Transifex. It’s no accident that we’re labeling this version as 1.0! More than two years since the first release, we’re now opening up Transifex to even more types of projects and translatable content. To accommodate these needs, we’ve raised our sleeves and went on to re-write the core Transifex translation storage engine. From scratch. Basically re-written more than 10.000 lines of code. :-)

The new core Transifex engine has moved away from the previous VCS-bound design. Transifex no longer requires access to your whole version control system, and now features increased flexibility and robustness. It now uses a string-based management system, instead of a file-based one, exposing a multi-layered infrastructure of importers, which handle a bunch of different file formats.

Major changes

1. Transifex’s native integration with Version Control Systems has been replaced by a mechanism for automatic updates of the source language file using HTTP, and a more secure command-line tool for project maintainers and translators.
2. Resources have now replaced the obsolete notion of components, which used to represent a VCS branch.
3. All operations are now done on a string-level, rather than a file-level, allowing greater flexibility and more features like suggestions, comments, translation memory, etc.
4. Tracking of source file changes now happen on top of HTTP, compared to the previous VCS-only support. This allows the translation of any source file hosted on any web server on the Internet.
5. Arbitrary translation of file types are now seamlessly supported, not just PO files. Transifex 1.0 also comes with native support for Qt files.

For full information on the new features, please refer to our Help Pages. More specifically, the big scary Transifex One-Dot-Zero and the 1.0 release page.

Moar featurez

• Source language file tracking over HTTP
• Translation file metadata auto-updating
• Clone language
• Non-English Source Languages
• Lotte: Multiple Source Languages, Suggestions, Keyboard Shortcuts, Translation Memory
• Application Programmable Interface

The Transifex.net upgrade

The upgrade of Transifex.com will begin on November 29, 10pm UTC and is expected to last a few hours. During this time we’ll be switching most of our content related to translations to read-only to ensure data consistency. Once everything seems to be in order, we’ll bring all services back to normal. This is expected to happen on November 30, around 2pm UTC.

If you’re a translator, the only differences you should notice are the UI improvements we made.

If you’re a developer, please refer to the section “Migrating Your Project" to make sure your code and workflow are migrated. Basically you’ll need to run a couple of commands on your local workstation and add to your Makefile a rule to pull fresh files from Transifex before you release your software.

For any kind of help, please contact us directly at support@transifex.com or via our GetSatisfaction page.

Here’s also a link to the newsletter we sent to all Txn users. You know, just in case. =)

Some Best Practices for Developers

Speaking of feature updates and migrating workflows ... if you're a developer, we know that your role in the localization and translation management process can be a difficult one if you don't have the right workflows in place. To help, we've put together a guide highlighting the practices that the best development teams put into place to streamline the localization process — from integrating localization into build cycles to tricks for avoiding string freezes. Download the free guide to learn more.