The How-To Library

Correct Your French or English Web Site (or Your Clients’) with WebElixir.

These days, many translators have their own web site – it may be just a page or two, but it is meant to outline their strengths and “sell” to potential clients. Most translators have also, at one time or another, translated a web site for their clients. Some of you do it on a regular basis.

When I point out mistakes or typos on web sites to translators, they usually counter with the claim that their normal spell checker does not work well or not at all with html code. Once it’s in a web format, it becomes harder to correct mistakes. BTW my students give me the same excuse when I take marks off their assignments for typing, grammar or spelling mistakes.

There is now a solution to help translators (and my students) in both French and English. There is a new product by the authors of Antidote, Druide informatique inc., launched only a few weeks ago, called WebElixir.

This product combines a program and a web service. The program checks your web site for grammatical or typing mistakes, and for missing links. The service sends you a report outlining, in a very visual way, what the mistakes are and what the corrections should be. Since it is based on the well-known Antidote agent, the suggested corrections are usually good and the number of false detections is quite low.

Contrary to Antidote or Prisme, it does not, however, make corrections directly in the source code, particularly since there are so many tools that you can use to do html programming. It is up to you to accept and make those corrections, using your favourite html programming tool. Naturally, if you do not make those changes, the next time you check, you have the same errors, but you can mark them off so they don’t appear again if you don’t agree with Web Elixir’s diagnostic.

WebElixir also checks for defective links, whether internal or external. Although there are programs out there to check missing links, they usually look only for external links. Internal links between sections or pages are overlooked. If, by mistake or otherwise, you have removed a link or a page, your visitor might get the (in)famous error 404.

WebElixir exists in two versions. The first version is free for personal use, for a site up to a maximum of 25 pages. This is perfect for translators who usually have very small web sites.

There is “Pro” version with scaled fees depending on how many sites you want to check and monitor and how many pages those sites have. You would use this version if you need to monitor your clients’ sites, particularly if you are the one who has done the translation of said site(s).

Besides the basic features mentioned above, the Pro version also tracks changes on the sites that you monitor and sends you a report with those changes clearly identified. This way, you can monitor your clients’ sites and make sure that any change done by them on the site in one language will get the proper translation (using Your services, of course).

Like Google Mail, WebElixir is distributed by invitation only (at least at the beginning). If you are a registered user of Antidote, you will be amongst the first group invited.

Sadly, for those of you who translate in other language pairs, only English and French are covered by WebElixir.

It should be noted that I have no personal interest in this software, or Druide Informatique, except as a satisfied user of Prisme. As a journalist, however, I usually find out about these things before anybody else – and can make my colleagues take advantage of this information.

For more information and details, see the WebElixir site at: webelixir.net

Georgette Blanchard, alias DocteurPC
Montreal, Canada

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