xTra4o stands for “XLIFF Translator for Oracle”, and more specific for APEX.
xTra4o is an application that iAdvise has built, already a few years ago, that helps in the translation process of an APEX application. This tool is publicly available as referenced by the APEX OTN site.
Read our blogs referring to this tool, posted in February 2007.
There is a one specific step within the process of tanslating an application that APEX itself does not so well support; it is step 3 where you must translate all translatable elements within the so-called XLIFF file.
Our xTra4o allows to upload this XLIFF file and translate the individual elements via a specific editor.
A first surplus of this tool is the possibility to write common terms in a Dictionary and use this Dictionary for translating similar terms.
Today we have added an additional useful feature to the tool. For each source term you can get the translation via the Google Translate API. Following screenshot shows the new icon, you can click on to let Google make the translation. In the example English terms must be translated into French:
As a user, you can always adjust the proposed translation yourself and decide to add the word in the Dictionary.
We have discovered that Google does not always treat ‘special characters’ in a proper way. For some of those signs (like the ‘#’ sign), we block the API call. It is possible that we do not block all special characters yet, but this can easily be added. If you detect such cases, let us know via the feedback option in the tool.
To use this Google Translate API we started from the PL/SQL code that you can find on this blog.
iAdvise blog 