Good news: Translator module for Ruby - "FIT" (Found in Translation)

I came across this interesting post from the Negonation guys, and thought it's worth to echo it here, as this is an important project which carries a significant contribution to the web dev scene.

Fit is an open source localization (languages translator) module for the Ruby on Rails environment, which aims "to develop an internationalization software for web applications that overcomes the limitations of current tools".

The project initiators and are Codemart, Beluga Linguistics and Negonation . My kudos to them as I've been dealing with this challenge in the past, and succeeding in it gave us our biggest asset.

Back in the days in Hyperbanner (see some background here), we had our own translator we used for the local communities. Hyperbanner's competitive advantage was the localization of the service, which became available with this system. This gave us our differentiation from LinkExchange (then no. 1, acquired by Microsoft for $250m), among some other neat features of course :)

Actually, the current build of FIT (see screencast) looks quite similar to what we had.

Several services are already implementing translations, but it's still a pain for the typical early stage web startup. FIT will try to bring better usability and smarter UI to make translation something you do on your 3rd and 4th release, rather than after raising the $10m.
If so, this can really be a little evolution in web dev. To be over poetic, this might be the 0.5 that can define web 2.5 (= basic localization is a standard feature in web services).

Check out their Google group here as well.

(Tags: FIT, localization, internationalization, translations, open source, ruby on rails)

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Comments

[juanse.perez]

Thanks for the mention, we're setting up a new trac site at http://fit.dit.upm.es