introducing the improved sewing translator

About three weeks ago, Liesl introduced our new community-developed translation website, sewingtranslator.com. If you missed that post, you can find it here.

We asked for feedback, and lots of you responded. Many of you mentioned that you wanted the site to help you sew from patterns written in foreign languages. The first version wasn’t designed in a way that made it easy to do that.

We’ve recently updated the site to address this issue and several others that you told us about. Here’s a summary of what’s new:

• When you visit the site, it detects which language you normally speak and automatically sets the user interface to that language.
• You can choose the language you want to translate from and the language you want to translate to. This makes it easier to use if you want to look up the translation of a term in a foreign language when you are sewing from a pattern.
• There are two new languages included.  (Thank you to Lotta and to S. S said we needed to add one of these new languages, and I promised her that if she gave me the complete translation for that language before the site update was released we would include it. She did, and so we did. Can you guess which language is the one she contributed?)
• Lots of little tweaks to address feedback you provided.

In the near future we will be adding at least two more languages, and later this year we will be expanding the list of terms.

This really is a community effort, and we want to thank everyone who has helped out by providing translations and submitting feedback. If you speak a language that’s not yet included and you would be willing to help add it or if you have other feedback on Sewing Translator, please let us know by clicking the Feedback link you see on the site. We read each and every submission that comes in.

Why not check out the new version of the site? Visit sewingtranslator.com to kick the tires for yourself.