Gengo has always strived to provide simple yet powerful translation tools. We just released our next-generation translation workbench that brings together in a single streamlined interface everything we’ve learned from your feedback and years of experience.

Our ultimate goal was to provide a platform for translation that gives assistance when wanted, but otherwise gets out of the way and lets translators do what they do best: translate.

Most translation tools contain features that are barely used—if even understood—by many translators. To begin this process of reinvention, we took a step back and asked ourselves: what is essential to the translation process?

As a result, we decided to strip back the previous workbench to its core and make each feature fight for its existence. The outcome is a refined user experience that is as easy for novices to use as is powerful for professionals to control.

Whether translators prefer working on a laptop or iPad, the new workbench adapts to their space. Watch the video below for a sneak peek.

Key changes

• Horizontal and vertical views—choose to have the source text above or to the left of the input area
• Job filters—when working on a large number of jobs, filter by those that are incomplete or have validation errors
• Autosave and validation—jobs are automatically saved and validated meaning a lost internet connection is nothing to worry about
• Auto highlighting—triple brackets, deflated HTML tags, glossary matches, errors and cautions are now subtly highlighted making it easier to distinguish what’s what
• More keyboard shortcuts—translators can now do almost everything in the workbench just using their keyboard
• Better glossaries—instead of interrupting the flow of the source text, glossary-term matches are now contained within a separate panel

The new workbench is the result of more than nine months of hard work by Gengons. It has been put through its paces by our quality assurance team as well as tested in the wild with real translators who were pivotal to refining the final product. A huge thanks to you all.

We’re looking forward to your feedback and, in many ways, this is just the beginning of something much bigger.