Plug-ins for XBench

A couple of weeks ago our engineers found that DataBridge, a Russian translation agency, developed a plug-in for XBench to check Russian translations. I certainly wanted to try it (and by the way, it is also free).

Additionally, it's been 7 months ago when plug-in functionality was added to XBench, and I've heard from a few people that they are developing for XBench. I decided to search the Internet to see if there are any other plug-ins on the market, but Google showed nothing.

So, DataBridge seems to be the first to provide publicly available extension to this quite popular tool. Unfortunately it generates as much "noise" (or false positives) as simple regular expression search. My understanding of a plug-in, however, is that it may (and shall) combine different regexes and other commands to implement complex search algorithms.

I'm not sure if XBench supports other approaches, but hard-coded criteria for Partial Translation and Incomplete Translation make those checks mostly useless. At least in my case what they generated were 100% false positives. For instance, I got an error every time I had a 10-character heading translated to a 7-character heading (or shorter).

Despite those issues, the initiative itself is great, and I guess the developers will focus on refining the search results and will translate their efforts into a powerful tool for Russian linguists.

As I put it in November, the next (and quite trendy indeed!) move for ApSIC, to my mind, would be to start XBench user's community to give a real boost to plug-in development and certainly to maintain a centralized list of such plug-ins.

And if anyone knows of other XBnech plug-ins and wants to share the info, please let me know!