Announcing Transifex 0.5

The Transifex Community is proud to announce the newest version of their flagship translation platform, Transifex 0.5, codenamed ‘Genesis’.

Transifex is a web application written in Python using the Django web
framework that gives translators a web interface to various version control
systems throughout the translation management and localization process. Files to be translated can be downloaded, translated files can be uploaded directly to the source repository, and various translation statistics can be read at a glance.

Transifex is already in use by the Fedora Project to translate its interfaces to an audience of more than 5 million users.

What does it offer?

Transifex currently supports the following Version control systems:

• Concurrent Version System
• Subversion
• Bazaar
• Mercurial
• Git

For statistics generation, Transifex supports static gettext message catalogs and intltool-based ones, used by the vast majority of open source software projects.

What’s new in 0.5?

A full list of the features offered in this release can be found in the release notes. This release represents a significant advance in Transifex development since the Transifex 0.3 release in November 2008. Here’s a 40K-foot view of the release in numbers and most important feature categories.

243 files changed, 14027 insertions(+), 319 deletions(-)

• Complete re-write of the source code on top of the Django Web framework
• New data model supporting multiple repositories per project (eg. branches
  or domains of files), and project collections (eg. Fedora, GNOME, etc.)
• Calculation of a project’s translation coverage (statistics)
• Submission support of files to a variety of version control systems
• Support for serving translation files to users for easy access to them
• User registrations and authentication (including OpenID)
• Simple workflow support

For a full list, please refer to the release notes.

What does it look like?

The Fedora Project is currently running an instance of Transifex on its Translations Portal. For some eye candy, check out the screenshots on our site.

How can I get it?

Project and community managers who want to deploy Transifex for their own community can get Transifex in a variety of ways. A tarball of Transifex 0.5 is available at: http://transifex.org/files/. For full installation instructions, refer to the documentation section. RPM packages for Fedora 9, Fedora 10, and Fedora Rawhide are or will soon be available via yum:

yum install transifex transifex-extras

RPM packages for RHEL 5, CentOS 5, and Scientific Linux 5 will be available in Fedora EPEL.

Localization Best Practices for Developers

We know that a developer's 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.