Downtime

The machine running Open-Tran has been restarted four days ago. Unfortunately, I was on vacation and received the notification about the server being down while relaxing in the Dead Sea :) The service was unavailable for about 48 hours until I got back home. I apologize for any inconvenience caused and promise that this will not happen again.

In order to avoid such situations in the future, I created a cron job that periodically tries to start the web server. So in case the server ever makes a restart like this again, the service should be back up within a couple of minutes.

More Projects

I am proudly announcing the following changes in the list of projects imported to the Open-Tran:

• I have switched Mozilla localization to Mercurial and imported phrases from 1.9.1 branch (which, as far as I can tell, is an equivalent for Firefox 3.5).
• Fedora (master) and Mandriva translations have been added.

Furthermore, I have changed the site's rendering so that the invisible elements do not show up while the site is loading.

JSON

Yesterday, I added the next feature. Now, you can use JSON in order to access translation suggestions from Open-Tran. As an example consider the following request: http://en.id.open-tran.eu/json/suggest/save as. It will return a list of results encoded as JavaScript objects, but with exactly the same fields as if you retrieved the output of an XML-RPC call (see our API documentation) of suggest2('en', 'id', 'save as'). Refer to a commented excerpt of an output for more details.

Words statistics

I've got one more feature for you. The words link now directs to a statistics of the most common words. The language depends on the URL-based language selection. That is: http://nl.open-tran.eu/words.html shows the most popular words for Dutch and http://af.open-tran.eu/words.html shows the most popular words for Afrikaans. You can also set 2 languages in order to have the links directing you to the appropriate comparison pages. For example: http://en.pt_br.open-tran.eu/words.html will show you the most popular English words with the links to their comparisons in Portuguese. If you have any questions regarding this feature, just let me know.

Specific phrases

Here it comes - the next most requested feature has been implemented. Now, you can require that the original phrase looks exactly (or almost exactly) like you specify. In a discussion with Leandro Regueiro, Alexander Dupuy suggested a way to implement this feature in a very nice, effective way. And so now, if you enclose your phrase (or its part) in double-quotes, open-tran will only show the results that contain that phrase. As you can see in the screenshot, I requested the phrase "_save as". The server interpreted the quotes as a request to return only those results, where the original phrase included this phrase literally. So now you can go ahead and try it yourself: http://en.pt_br.open-tran.eu/suggest/"_save as".

This is not the end of news. Did you know that:

• Virtaal supports Open-Tran as its Memory Translation?
• Open-Tran website has been translated into twenty languages in 5 alphabets?

Periodic Updates

I'd like to announce a long-awaited feature - periodic updates of the database. Me and Leonardo, have been working on this feature for more than 2 months and yesterday, the service has successfully updated itself automatically for the first time. In order to circumvent the limitations of the open-tran.eu server, we have split the importing process and distributed it between 2 servers. We are running the update twice a week, but not every execution succeeds.

There are still couple of details to be worked out: the statistics of words, phrases and projects are not updated yet and the switch still needs to be performed manually.

Search Engine Plugin

Some time ago, while implementing one of the new features I had to turn off the advertising of search engines. They existed, but were not really easy to add to the browser if you didn't know the exact URL. Today, I updated the service so that the plugin is easier to add.

The combination of languages for the advertised search engine is inferred from the URL and your settings. So the search engine advertised at http://pl.en.open-tran.eu adds an engine for suggestions between Polish and English, but the one at http://de.fr.open-tran.eu adds an engine for suggestions between German and French.