First, as you could notice, the design and ergonomics have changed. The interface – we hope- is clearer and contains more explanations. You can more easily find your bearings and understand the different steps to take.

As regards the functional part of the platform, there are 4 important new features. First, you are now able to invite reviewers to read and revise the translations provided automatically by Flavius (see in green in the figure below).

Secondly, you can also relaunch the translation job at any moment (see in red in the figure below). What is this feature for?

1.    To update your translated website, if you have added new content to your original one. Don’t worry; you won’t lose the corrections and revisions you brought to the first translation. They are saved and will be reused in the next translation processes.

2.    To relaunch the translation process after creating a user dictionary. Imagine… you have created a translation job and you realize – when revising the translation – than several frequent terms are not well-translated (e.g. proper names, set phrases…). We advise you to create a user dictionary that contains those terms and their correct translations. You can create it directly on the Flavius platform and then relaunch your translation job. The quality of the translation will be significantly improved. (see our post How to use the Dictionary?)

Another important development that will make your life easier when revising translations is the possibility to apply the revisions changes to the whole translated website. For example, if your website’s name was not well translated, there is no need for changing it on all pages. You just have now to change it once and select the option “Replace all” on the revision window. Do not forget to click on the button “Apply revision changes” in order to ensure the replacement (see in purple in the figure below).

Moreover, you can now translate into 3 interesting new languages, namely Portuguese, Arabic and Chinese.

The Flavius platform is constantly improving in order to offer you the most comprehensive and efficient tool. Feel free to give your feedback. It is still in beta version and free, so enjoy it!

After many changes in the URL revision modules for the last version, we worked hard on the XML revision interface.  You can now translate your XML files and revise them with a handy user interface – just use tab to go to the next label quickly, and you’ll be able to fix the small mistakes in no time. Other features include progression management and smart sorting that enables you to save time when you go back to the interface.

The second big change is the complete review of the notification system – something the users asked for. In the previous version, it was sometimes tricky to know when you had to interact with Flavius in order to get your site published. Now, the service sends you emails when your input is needed and a facebook-style notification centre has been created to allow you to track progress on different jobs (whether they are URL or XML jobs).

A lot of work has also been performed behind the scenes to enhance the performance of the whole website and improve the user experience with small but powerful modifications in the workflow, such as the asynchronous publication and revised job details page.

The Flavius platform is still in development, so you can try it for free and help us improve it with your feedback!

As an early active user, you are defining the service: we rely a lot on the user feedback to implement new features.

Give us a shot, get your website multilingual with Flavius!

The “flagship” of this release is the post-edition module implemented in the “URL” scenario.

The workflow is the following:

- You enter the URL of your website

- You define the translation settings:

• What is the language of your website? In which languages do you want to translate it?
• Do you want to use the spell-checking option in order to detect possible errors in your original content ! Reminder: Spelling mistakes deteriorate the final translation quality!
• Do you want to use a personal dictionary  in the translation process? This customization feature significantly improves the translation quality.

- Once the translation job is done, you can visualize your translated website and post-edit it. It’s totally interactive! You browse your translated website. If you notice a mistranslated text, you hover over it: it’s becoming yelow! You click on the “post-edit” icon and the “post-edition” window opens. You can then revise the translated text (with the original text besides). When you’re done, you see the changes directly on the page! Post-edited texts are highlighted in green when you hover your mouse over them.

- You can now publish your translated website in once click. You can choose to index or not this version. Indexing your website means that it will be found in the search engines’ results.

- Once your translated website is published, you retrieve its URL and add it to your original website so that users can switch from one version to another.

The Flavius platform is still in development, so you can try it for free and help us improve it with your feedback!

Get your website multilingual with Flavius!

How does it work?

On the main dashboard you click on the “dictionary” section and then on “create a dictionary”. After selecting the languages (for example from English to French), you have two options, either you import an already created dictionary as a CSV format, or you create a new one using our dictionary editor. We recommend you to use this latter option, since it is much easier. You just have to enter the word(s) and their translation line by line. At any time, you can edit or remove a line. Once you are done, you click on “submit”. We advise you to wait 5 minutes before launching a translation job, since it takes a few minutes before the Flavius platform pushes the dictionary to the production engine.

The newly created dictionary will be activated by default. It means that it will be used in the future translation jobs involving the same languages. You can deactivate it by simply turning off the option on the “dictionary” dashboard.

What kind of entries should I enter in my personal dictionary?

There are several rules to be observed in order to optimize the positive impact dictionaries on translation quality.

1. The words included in the dictionary should have a high frequency in the context in which they are used.
2. They should be unambiguous. It means that they must have a clear meaning and should not open to interpretation.
3. You must be careful with one-word entries since they can present the risk of breaking up the sentence at the moment of the automatic translation and thus, reducing the overall accuracy.
4. It is highly recommended to add phrases (at least, made of 2 words) to the dictionary, since it improves the overall translation quality.
5. Words are preserved as listed in the dictionary. Therefore, if you want to have variants for a word (gender, number or spelling…), you have to include them in your dictionary list.

Quick case study

We translated the Flavius platform into French using the Flavius system. In order to optimize the translation quality, we created an English-to-French dictionary.

We added entries such as:

• Expressions: e.g. “Easy end-to-end solution” translated by “Solution complète et facile d’utilisation”. In this instance, we wanted to ensure that this expression – which is key since it describes what the Flavius platfom is – were well-translated. Concretely, each time the translation engine will encounter the English expression “Easy end-to-end solution”, it will translate it into French  by “Solution complète et facile d’utilisation”
• Unambiguous and frequent words: e.g. “new job” translated by “nouvelle tâche”. “Job” in French is normally translated by “travail” (which is also “work”), but in the case of our platform, it is used in the meaning of “task”. As the word is quite frequent in the content of our website and its meaning is always the same, we created a dictionary entry for it.

Have a try on the Flavius platform and give us your feedback!

You just have to create an account.

• Source text display in tooltip: when you are browsing the translated versions of your website and hovering over a text, you get the original text in a tooltip. It allows you to flag translation errors more easily and to complement your understanding of the translated site.

• New languages and translation engines : Flavius is modular and can use various translation engines. Currently it provides a sample of baseline translation directions from LanguageWeaver Statistical Machine Translation. In the near future it will offer “trained” versions of LanguageWeaver engines, and other engines, other languages like Russian. Test it!

 
• Technical improvement to enable indexing:  the translated versions of your website can now be indexed by search engines. The description that will appear then in search engines like Google will contain the translated version of your original description. You’re on your way to increase the international traffic on your site.

In addition to the URL option, we offer the possibility for computer-savvy users to export XML files from their website and get them translated onto the platform. Here are the main new functions available on Flavius:

• Spell-checking feature: you can view the number and type of errors (spelling, grammar…) contained in your source text, grouped by word with mistake. Soon you’ll be able to see spell-checking report for your HTML site.

• XML file handling: you can now handle more XML file types : ResX for .net developers, general XML in UTF-8 (even if without BOM)

Coming soon: post-edition feature, link between post-edition and translation memory, online dictionary editor…

We are moving forward!

If you have imported a memory, the Flavius system will first check inside if the content to be translated can be retrieved. If there is no match, it will use the automatic translation.

In future versions, the translation memory will contain the segments that were post-edited in your previous Flavius jobs (segments for which you or your provider edited manually the translation provided by the Machine translation).

On the Translation Memory homepage, accessible from the dashboard, you just click on the Import TMX file button and a modal window will open. Then, you have to upload your file and fill in the Source and Target languages fields.

Important: the translation memory file must be saved in TMX format (with the extension .tmx). Flavius accepts TMX format v1.3 and v1.4.

Now this feature only works with XML file translation.

More info on translation memories

Step 1: Create a dictionary

The dictionary should contain your key phrases, terms specific to your business or brand names. Besides, it is also a way to impose certain translations over the ones provided otherwise by the MT engines.

The words but mostly phrases included in the dictionary should have a significant importance in the context in which they are used. They should also be unambiguous. It means that they must have a clear meaning and should not open to interpretation (so no single words with different parts of speech : “shot” should not be entered, but “nice shot” or “he was shot dead” could be entered). To let you know about the best practices, we will soon publish an article about how to optimize the impact of dictionaries.

The following fields are necessary in your dictionary file:

• Source (required): refers to the source term : the term you wish to translate. For instance, for an English-French dictionary, the source language is English.
• Target (required): refers to the target term : in other words, the translation.
• Comments (optional): any comment you would like to add about the dictionary entry, the reason for which you created this specific entry, etc…

More concretely, it should look like: sourceterm, targetterm, comment. For example: education software,logiciels éducatifs,comment.
Be careful not to forget the comma after the targetterm, even if there are no following comments.

Important: the dictionary file must be saved in CSV format (with the extension .csv, meaning that columns are separated by a coma) and encoded in UTF-8.

At a later stage we will design “wizards” to help you import, create, manage dictionaries.

Step 2: Import dictionary on Flavius

On the dictionary homepage, accessible from the dashboard, you just click on the Import Dictionary File (CSV) button and a modal window will open. Then, you have to upload your file and fill in the Source and Target languages fields.

You are notified that the import is done on the right-hand section of the dictionary homepage.

If the dictionary contains duplicate source terms, the dictionary will be rejected.

After the import, it can take a few minutes before being able to use the dictionary. It is the necessary time to push to all production engines.

Step 3: Manage dictionary

Once imported, your dictionary is automatically active. You can deactivate it by a simple “uncheck” on the dictionary dashboard.

When you create a new job in a language pair, for which you have imported a dictionary, the option “use dictionary” is checked off by default. Of course, you can uncheck it.

We have released the 1.0 version of the Flavius platform, with new features, improved design and easy navigation.

What can you do on this version ?

You can get websites translated with some customization features, either by uploading data files (XML files coming from WordPress, ReSX or other applications files) or entering the URL of a website. As the service is totally free for the moment, we have set a limit on upload size and number of links to crawl for websites.

We have released two new features, that ensure improvement in the translation quality, namely translation memory and personal dictionary for machine translation.

The first one allows to plug user translation memories and apply them before the machine translation process (it works currently only on XML file translation).

The second one is about building personalized dictionaries containing phrases or expressions that have a special meaning for the content to translate or which is mistranslated by our MT engines. We will give more details on  both features in a next post.

Have a look at this first version of Flavius and give us your feedback on design, use of features, explanations… Improvement suggestions are more than welcome !

The purpose of the Flavius project is to produce foreign language versions of Internet and User Generated Sites

What we achieved in the phase 1:

• Translate URL / html for simple Internet sites without intervention from WebMaster
• Translate XML large file for large internet sites with WebMaster.

We tested it on various sites and on XML files from partners.

Process description:

What are the goals for phase 2? All features will not necessarily be implemented.

• Create various user profiles with various rights : number and size of translations (in total and per period), priorities, languages, storage (sites hosted on Flavius platforms)…
• Management of priorities and queuing system
• Add more translation engines, parameters and specialized terminologies
• Usage of Translation Memory (shared or per user)
• Post-editing capabilities
• Control panel for administrator : list of users per profile, list of jobs performed
• SEO processing :
• If possible, some integration in some CMS

The Flavius project is going to be presented at Localization World, the leading conference for localization and translation professionals. This year, it takes place in the vibrant city of Barcelona.

We will demonstrate the current version on “real life” examples and describe the goals of the platform, the roles of all partners, and the evolutions for the final release.