Through the Interface

Russian Homestyler ready for testing

I mentioned some time ago that our Localization Services (LS) team was embarking on a community-based translation of Homestyler into Russian. The fruits of this labour are now ready for testing: the various translation projects, for the application, for its content and for supporting web-pages are now 100% complete. But that’s not to say things haven’t been missed or mis-translated, so we would love to get feedback from Russian speakers on the quality of the work performed. The below information has been provided by our LS team for people who are interested in taking Russian Homestyler for a spin... Read more →

Autodesk Collaborative Translation Platform

The Localization Services team at Autodesk – many of whom also work from our office in Neuchâtel – has launched a “crowdsourced” translation platform: the Autodesk Collaborative Translation Platform. This mechanism is intended to allow members of the Autodesk community to help us translate our software into different languages. The first project being hosted on the platform is for the Russian version of Homestyler. To participate in this project, you need to be over 18, proficient in Russian and in possession of an Autodesk ID. For other information on the platform, see the FAQ. This is really an exciting... Read more →

TransTips now live on Autodesk Exchange

Just a quick update to let you know that – as a result of the steps we took to prepare and submit the application for consideration – TransTips is now live on the Apps tab of Autodesk Exchange, which means it can now be loaded more easily into AutoCAD 2012: This application was first posted on this blog, and has since become a Plugin of the Month on Autodesk Labs. If you'd like to see it in action (and in products other than AutoCAD), please see this YouTube video. Read more →

September’s Plugin of the Month live on Autodesk Labs: TransTips

Regular readers of this blog may have followed the development of this plugin, but I’ve written this post is to announce its availability more officially (in addition to Scott’s post from last week). TransTips uses the Bing Translator web service to translate tooltips into one of 36 languages on-the-fly, as they are displayed by AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit, 3ds Max and the products based upon them. The 36 languages are those currently supported by the Bing Translator service: Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian,... Read more →

Translating tooltips in AutoCAD, Inventor and Revit using .NET

Once again, it turned out to be pretty straightforward to add Inventor support to our TransTips application. We now have a single solution which builds plugins for AutoCAD, Inventor and Revit. The plugins share a common translation and caching engine as well as a WPF graphical user interface for selecting languages. Here’s a demonstration of the various plugins in action: I’ve fixed the right-to-left issue highlighted in the video, incidentally. The next steps are to implement an in-product editing capability and then perhaps to support 3ds Max. One great aspect of this project is that I’m getting to learn... Read more →

Translating tooltips in both AutoCAD and Revit using .NET

A quick update, today. Last week Jeremy posted a migrated version of the TransTips plug-in for AutoCAD, this time working inside Revit. Thanks to the shared use of AdWindows.dll in both products, this was actually really easy. After this initial version, it made sense to refactor the code to have a core, shared file (not necessarily a separate DLL component – sharing source can give many benefits for smaller projects, such as this) used to build plugin DLLs for both AutoCAD and Revit. Here’s the result: a single solution which will build TransTips DLLs for AutoCAD and Revit (including... Read more →

Caching translations of AutoCAD tooltips using .NET

In this previous post we introduced a technique for automatically translating AutoCAD’s tooltips in... Read more →

Automatic translation of AutoCAD tooltips using .NET

One of the great benefits I have from working in our Neuchâtel office is my proximity to a great many talented members of Autodesk’s Worldwide Localization team, who are responsible for translating most of our products into various languages. Over the last few months, I’ve been working even more closely than usual with that team, mainly looking at ways Autodesk might broaden the ability to localize our software. A couple of hot topics are of particular interest, these days, in the world of localization: machine translation and crowdsourcing. The implementation I’ll be showing over the next few posts actually... Read more →