Easyling Release Notes - 2015 January

The new year rolled around in Budapest with champagne and fireworks, and so we returned to work from our end-of-year holidays, refreshed, and ready to bring you a plethora of new features and powers for Easyling. We have rolled out the ability to hold back segments from being published automatically to the live site, enhanced our JavaScript translation abilities, and we rolled out many new settings, tools, and tweaks into our Advanced Settings menu. See the full list after the break!

Maybe our most exciting feature to date is Manual Publishing. It allows you to hold back new translations from appearing on the live page as soon as they’re submitted, letting you publish them manually. The feature can be turned on in the Advanced Settings menu, and as its description warns, it is not retroactive: it will only affect new translations going forward. Once it is activated, the Bulk Actions menu in the Workbench gains a new entry, that of Publishing. This enables you to “synchronize” the Workbench and the proxied page, as shown by the icon to the right of each entry: if the arrows are lit, the entry is “in synch” with the live page, the same thing is displayed, if the icon is not active, however, the live page carries an earlier version of the entry, and should be synchronized by publishing the new translation. Please note, however, that the Preview does not honor the publishing setting, and will always display the latest translations, to allow you to spot layout problems stemming from text expansion, before pushing the translations live on the proxied site.

Similarly exciting is our expansion of the Advanced Settings menu, the area we affectionately call “Hardling” in-house. As you may recall from experience or from earlier blogs, this is the area that houses the settings which generally require some technological aptitude, but can prove instrumental in being able to translate a site the way you want it. Now, following the completion of mega-project by one of our partners, we decided to open some of the results of this mega-project to the general public, resulting in no less than seven new settings to ease your life (or make it harder, in some cases).

  * _XPath Translation_: XPath is the standard of referencing elements of an eXtensible Markup Language file (XML), a format that is often used to transmit structured data in a both machine and human readable format. By entering XPath references (one per line) into this field, you can instruct Easyling to translate XML files you mark as translatable from the Resources menu. Entering "html" separated by a space after the XPath will attempt to translate the given element as HTML, stripping out the HTML tags and requiring you to only translate the actual content.
  * _Translate Multiple Resources_: By entering any number of fully qualified URL prefixes here (the entire URL of the original, including the protocol, as a prefix), you can force Easyling to consider anything on the specified path as translatable content, instead of a binary resource. This is useful in combination with the XPath translation feature: by specifying the path to all your XMLs as a prefix, you will not have to mark them all translatable individually, as Easyling will be dropping them all into the Pages menu in the first place. Of course, you can do the same for any file or path, this feature will force the dictionary to be created for that path prefix and anything on it.
  * _Ignore ID_: Similar to our previous feature of ignoring certain HTML classes, this feature lets you do the same for HTML IDs. Anything inside an element bearing the specified ID will the considered translation-invariant, and will not even be extracted during a crawl. If it is already extracted, new or existing translations will no longer be applied.
  * _Translating Custom Attributes_: Sometimes, we run into site frameworks that rely on certain custom attributes for content or logic. If your site uses such a framework, you can enter the relevant attributes into the relevant field, and we will extract them and offer them up for translation. Translating the attribute as text will pull it into the Workbench and any XLIFF exports created afterwards, while translating it as a link will instruct the proxy to map the link into a relative URL so that it goes through the proxy as well. Typical examples: _data-content_, _data-text_, _data-src_, _data-link_, _data-url_
  * _Heuristic Tag Alignment_: Sometimes, tagging may change between the creation of a translation memory and actually applying it to a site in Easyling. This may result in matches of lower confidence levels, which may prevent a pre-translation from inserting the matches. To end this, we created a heuristic algorithm that attempts to return tags to their rightful places by comparing the punctuation of the entry under translation and its equal in the TM, and placing tags accordingly. This will result in a 0.1% increase in the confidence level of the entry, which may be the only thing it needs to be applied as a translation during a TM application run.
  * _Translate Excluded Pages in the Preview_: It may happen that you have pages that are excluded from translation, but you still want to see how they would look translated after the existing translations are propagated to them. By activating this feature, excluded pages will also be translated, as long as you are looking at them in the Preview mode - the live proxying mode will of course honor the exclusion, and will not apply your translations on the excluded pages.

As a small addition, we also changed our project listing: now, it will also display aliases that you entered for a project, if you named them. So if you took advantage of our earlier enhancement of having multiple projects for the same domain, you will no longer need to hunt for the right one in your list, you can just name them as you wish!

And with this, we move on to February, where we hope to bring you similarly exciting new features and enhancements!