What changed in the first week of September

Most of what shipped this week is the kind of thing you notice only when it is missing: a queue instead of one file at a time, help where the trouble is, a number where a claim used to be. Here is the list, in the order a person meets it.

Drop anything, in any number

My work is now a queue. Drop pictures, PDFs, documents and pasted text — as many as you like — and they become rows that translate in order on your device, each with its own status line, each with Stop, Continue, Retry, Remove, Open and Download as its state allows. Two or more files dropped on the home box, on Translate, on Documents or on PDF go straight there. Close the tab and the queue pauses; open My work again and it carries on from the first unfinished row.

Two things arrived on top of it. A Find and replace bar searches the translations of every ready row and applies one correction to all of them with the Desk's own edit rules, remembering each corrected sentence for next time. And a Pages you own panel lists every page of every ready PDF and picture, lets you re-order or drop them, and merges them into one PDF in your order — or downloads every ready row in its own format as one ZIP. All of it is composed on the device.

The desktop app's Batch tab and the phone's Documents screen became the same queue: the same rows, the same status line, the same Stop and Continue — with the desktop writing each result to your Documents folder and the phone offering to share it.

A guide with a page per tool

The one long help page became a set of articles: start here, the language pack, how private it is exactly, each tool, the glossary and the memory, the Desk, the subscription, and what to do when something goes wrong. Each tool page links to its article. Every sentence in them was checked against the product before it went up — we wrote about that check separately, because it found eighteen wrong sentences in our own first drafts.

A page per language, with a number

Every one of the sixty-six languages now has a page that says what Traxlate does for it: the script and direction, whether the picture reader has data for it, whether an on-device voice exists and how big it is, whether the formal-and-informal check covers it, and — where we have measured it — a quality score, with the tier that produced it and how many sentences it was measured on. Thirty-five languages carry a number. The others say "not measured yet", because a number we did not measure would be a guess with a decimal point.

The same first run everywhere

The desktop and phone apps used to explain the first-run download in four slightly different ways, disagreeing on the noun, the device and the claim. They now read from one shared text, as do the privacy line in Settings, the speak button, and the error messages — every error names its cause and exactly one fix, on the phone as on the desktop. Both apps gained a Help section that opens the guide, the changelog and support, and a version line you can paste into a support mail.

Fixed, and named as fixed

• PDFs failed to open on browsers a few months old, because a library update relied on a feature they do not have. The compatible build is used now.
• On some Intel Macs the browser's graphics path produced nonsense instead of a translation while reporting success. The page now detects it, switches to the processor path, and redoes the sentence; on the affected machines it skips the graphics path from the start.
• The Windows app refused JPEG and other common picture formats because its image decoder was built with PNG only.
• The downloads page offered an Apple Silicon build from August and an Intel Mac build with no engine behind it. Both were rebuilt the same day.

The full list, release by release, is on the changelog.

Does the queue send my files anywhere?

No. Rows are translated on your device and the results live in your browser's storage; nothing is uploaded and the queue is not synced between devices.

Why do some language pages say "not measured yet"?

Because we only print a quality number we have measured on a standard test set. Thirty-five languages have one so far; the rest are supported by the engine and will get a number when we measure them.

Where is the new first-run text?

In one shared module the desktop and phone apps both read. Changing it changes both apps, and a test pins the wording.