Easyling Release Notes March, 2023

Well, the 4th of April passed, and the release notes still weren’t published. I believe it’s appropriate to say that it’s 4/04, release notes not found. Also, sorry about that, this month was quite hectic with all the different features we released. The highlights are all in Crest, our JavaScript-based translation engine. This month, we focused on attribute translation and additional customisation options for the language selector. Read the full article for the details!

Improved Crest attribute translation & modification

Attributes in HTML documents are extra pieces of information that are used to describe a given element. Images have many of them. Consider the following HTML snippet:

...
<img src="https://cdn2.thecatapi.com/images/bng.jpg" alt="Four kitten mostly asleep">
...

It’ll look like this:

This image has two attributes that need to be processed, src and alt. The former specifies the URL of the image while the latter provides a description for screen readers and low-bandwidth scenarios where the image can’t be loaded.

For localisation, the more important one is alt. Up until now, Crest would translate it and consider it translated. But the astute observer may ask what if it is later changed? Well, nothing used to happen. With this month’s release, we added the option to check for changes and re-applying translations. We also fortified the new content detection algorithm to ensure that partially or fully translated content isn’t considered to be new untranslated content. This prevents ingesting translated content as source.

More customisable language selector

When we initially designed the sidebar language selector, we assumed that very few people would actually use it. The assumption was that most websites would create their own bespoke selectors that perfectly match their design. This proved not to be the case.

With the influx of new users, the requirements changed too - we needed more customisation. This month, we added the option to add custom flags to it. This is useful in two main scenarios

• Translating from en-US to es-US. In this case, both languages would have the flag of the United States by default. It can now be changed to the Union Jack or the Bandera de España.
• The flags can be replaced to better match the style of the website. Maybe our flat flags don’t match a cartoony website, or you’d prefer ones with rounded corners. Now all of that is possible.

Note that this option isn’t available on the Dashboard 2.0 yet. Please drop us a line if you want to try it out. I feel like I’m now putting it into every month’s release notes, but we can be reached at support@easyling.com.

Translation memory

Have you ever tried uploading gigantic TMX files? At least one user did, and they reached out letting us know that the process may time out. To work around this issue, we added support for uploading ZIP files with the TMXes. With the smaller file size of the compressed archive, it shouldn’t time out. Or if it does, your TMX is so large that it’ll cause issues elsewhere anyway, and I’ll be genuinely surprised if you can use it in any other tool.

The usual bullet point list of other improvements

We could call this section TUBPLoOI, but I’m not sure if it’s catchy enough.

• We changed the Usage reports so that you can now get a report of projects that you own and projects that belong to your wallet separately. In most cases, these are the same, but due to a technicality, they may not be.
• We added an automated process to regularly check our integration with XTM, so that we can proactively update our side of it when the XTM team changes theirs.
• A bug that caused the top bar of the Workbench to be transparent was fixed.
• Crest now keeps track of segments that it reported as new and doesn’t re-report them. This saves some bandwidth.
• It now also checks the lang attribute of a document to detect third-party translation processes, like Google Chrome’s built-in translator.