The Multilingual App Toolkit v2.1 has been released!

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2013/10/01 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2013/10/01/10453295.aspx

I am a big fan of letting those who know be given the opportunity to do, so when Cameron Lerum and Palle Petersen have the chance te do a guest blog, I'm happy to let them do it.

So today's blog will be a guest blog, sponsored by the two of them, for your enjoyment.

If you use the Multilingual App Toolkit (MAT) you have already enjoyed the free translations provided via the integrated Microsoft Translator service. Machine translation is a great way to test your app in multiple target languages without losing any time waiting on friends, family, professional translators or even yourself! get me wrong, we all know that while machine translation is a valuable tool, it does provide an opportunity for your bilingual friends to have some fun with your unmodified results. So, if you are looking for beyond free machine translations, keep reading!

The Multilingual App Toolkit v2.1 was released on International Translation Day (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Translation_Day) and now includes a translation provider that supports the Microsoft Language Portal APIs. These APIs provide direct and FREE access to Microsoft’s vast collection of UI String translations and terminologies. (You’ll may never have to translation “Cancel” again!).

The new Microsoft Language Portal provider is enabled by default when you install MAT and provides a level of matching that will allow you to improve your machine translations once you move from testing to tuning your translations before shipping that next great app! (I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty tired of copying and pasting strings and terms from the web version of the Portal service (http://www.microsoft.com/language) for my apps.

Here is a screen shot of the included Editor demonstrating the suggestion functionally and the different installed translation providers.

As you probably noticed, you’ll not always going to get an exact match from the Language Portal. To help ensure that more resources are available, case is currently ignored as well as hotkeys and punctuation.

However, this is very easy to touch-up after the fact, especially since the exact string that was originally used when creating the human based translation is displayed in-line. This can provide you with high confidence that - even with some tweaking - this is a high quality translation that you can use in your app.

Of course, if an exact machine is found the resource is automatically marked as ‘Translated’ instead of ‘Needs review’. This allows you to simply translate all your resource, then use the editor’s filter to scope to display only string that could probably use a little extra help, such as resources with a state of ‘Needs review’

We did remember for those of you that want to only process translation interactively. This is where the Suggest button comes into action. Simple start by selecting this first resource in the Editor’s resource grid view and press the ‘Suggest’ button.

Doing so will display a list of suggestion from each installed translation provider. To quick accept the desired suggestion and automatically get the suggestion for the next ‘New’ resource, simply double-click the preferred suggestion. Alternately, you can press Alt+1 through Alt+9 to take the suggestion based on the ‘seq’ column number. This will automatically apply the suggestion and auto-suggest the next resource as well.

Of course, not all suggestions can be taken without a little tuning. To quickly apply a suggestion without automatically advancing resources, click the ‘Apply Suggestion’ button instead. This will apply the suggestion without advancing, making it easy to tune the suggestion before tackling the next resource. Happy belated International Translation Day! 😏;-)

Do you have a link where to get it from? Thanks

Cool, but where do I get it?

Silly me - I did not add the link to the article! Here it is: msdn.microsoft.com/.../hh848309

Note: Ignore the For Visual Studio 2012 header. It works with both 2012 and 2013 editions, including express for Windows and Windows Phone.

Thank you very much for a clear, straightforward explanation.

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