We are happy to announce that we finally released tools enabling you to use Tolgee to translate also to iOS, Mac and other Apple platform Apps, Android, Flutter, PHP and C++. Also, you can reliably export to generic formats like Structured JSON with support for arrays or XLIFF.
To provide a convenient way of editing translations for developers, translators, localization managers, project managers and other stakeholders, we made our translation editor visual, so you can conveniently edit plurals and you can edit strings without the need to understand the placeholders or HTML tags syntax.
New Formats Support
Tolgee now supports the following formats:
- Tolgee Native JSON
- Generic Structured JSON (With Arrays Support)
- Generic XLIFF
- Apple .strings and .stringsdict (for iOS, macOS and other Apple platforms)
- Android Resources XML
- Flutter ARB
- PHP Gettext .po
- C/C++ Gettext .po
- Java (.properties)
Convenient plurals editing in the visual editor is supported for all formats as well as placeholders visualization as described below.
The Visual Editor
There are several issues regarding editing translation messages in different message formats and raw HTML. For example this ICU message:
Hello, {name}! You have been promoted to <strong>{position}</strong>
To edit this message, the translator needs to understand the ICU Message Syntax, so they know the {name} and
{position} are placeholders representing the user's name and new position. They need to understand that the <strong> is
an HTML tag they must not translate (e.g., to <fuerte> to Spanish). The purpose of a visual editor is to hide the syntax
from the translators and provide a convenient way to edit such messages.
This way, the translator to Spanish only needs to type the actual translated text and add the placeholders by clicking the missing placeholders below the input field.
Another benefit of the visual editor is the convenience when editing right-to-left language translations. The placeholders and HTML are still left-to-right; mixing them with right-to-left leads to weird cursor movements and behavior. When displaying visualized placeholders instead of the raw syntax, the translator's cursors always move naturally, and they don't have to think about the order of opening and closing HTML tags.
Tolgee Universal ICU Placeholders
For formats that are not natively using ICU Message Format, Tolgee can convert the placeholders to the Tolgee Universal ICU Placeholders when importing, so you can edit them in the visual editor. These placeholders are then converted back when exporting. Read more about this concept in docs.
The main benefit of using unified placeholder syntax is that you're able to use the same localization data in different target platforms since these placeholders can be converted to every supported format.
Convenient Plural Editing
The ICU Message format was always native for Tolgee since it greatly supports plurals and has formatted implementations in many programming languages. However, editing such plural messages can be challenging for translators.
E.g., the following ICU message:
{count, plural, one {You have one message} other {You have {count} messages}}
Using the visual editor, you can easily edit each form separately, which makes the translation much more convenient, while hiding the relatively complex ICU syntax from translators.
Also, all the tools like Translation memory or Machine translation show only the single plural form translation.
Shiny New Layout
To make the Tolgee Translations view more flexible, we moved the translation tools, the comments and history to the right panel. The right panel provides a single interface for all the views and allows us to add new panels in the future. We also plan to introduce the ability to create custom apps and expose access to this panel in the API to give developers a way to create custom tools for their needs.
TL;DR
- Our latest release streamlines Tolgee's use across various platforms, including iOS, Mac, Android, Flutter, PHP, and C++.
- It enables a wider range of formats, a visual editing experience, and a fresh layout for more seamless translation and localization processes.
- Enhanced placeholder and plural editing simplifies the translation effort, encouraging consistency across formats.
Let us know in the Tolgee Slack community if you have any questions about those new features!
