Basecamp is being used by companies all over the globe, but until today they’ve had to make do with a user interface in English. That might be fine for creative professionals used to dealing with English in their company, but it’s often a problem for dealing with clients who are more comfortable in their native tongue. We’re tackling that problem today.

The Basecamp interface has been translated into nine languages already and we have even more coming. The languages that are going live today are French, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazillian), Dutch, Greek, Polish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish. Italian, Russian, and Slovak are not far behind and will be ready soon.

You can change the language of any company in Basecamp by going to the edit company screen and picking from the language drop-down.

Everyone from that company will now see Basecamp in the selected language. (We’re open to making localization a person-by-person option, but we’re just starting with companies for now.)

Getting a translated interface just right is hard, though. So it’s unlikely that all of these translations are perfect out the gate. But we wanted to get them out there and get some feedback on what we need to improve.

We’ve set up a dedicated mailing list for translations to help connect people willing to work on improvements.

The translation team
We couldn’t have done this without an amazing team working on translations. We’d like to extend a big thank you to the following translators for their hard work. I did a fair share of the Danish translation myself and I can tell you that it’s harder than it sounds to translate the 2,000 strings needed for Basecamp.

• French by Christophe Porteneuve from Ciblo
• Spanish by Nacho Carretero from Albucasis Traducciones Especializadas and José Espinal
• Portuguese (Brazillian) by Rafael Rosa from Ruby Inside Brasil
• Dutch by Helen Potters
• Greek by Petros Amiridis
• Polish by Piotr Petrus from riddle.pl
• Norwegian by Henrik Hodne
• Danish by Jakob Skjerning from Substance Lab and yours truly
• Swedish by Fredrik Mårtenson

If your language is not on the lists mentioned, we could use your help. We’re looking for volunteer Basecamp users that would use the application in their own language to help make it available. Please write [email protected] with the subject “Translate Basecamp into LANGUAGE” if you’d like to help.

The Rails infrastructure
The technical side of things relies on the excellent i18n infrastructure already present in Ruby on Rails and a new tool we developed called Tolk. It gives translators a web interface for updating the phrases and can even track things like updated strings. It made translating Basecamp much simpler. It’s completely open source and free for anyone else to use. Enjoy!

A potential new customer saw a coupon code at our site and asked us for an additional discount on Highrise.

Initial draft of a response:

I’m sorry, but we don’t offer any discounts or special pricing beyond what is published on our website. If you’d like to signup for a new paid account today, you’ll have the 30 day free trial, but we can’t offer any additional discounts on subsequent months. Sorry about this.

Seemed negative so went back to the drawing board:

We’d love to have you as a customer. I think you and the business will be very happy with Highrise. When you signup for a trial account, you automatically get 30 days free time before you’ll be charged. On top of that, if you use 37HRWEL as the coupon code, you’ll get 20% off the first month. That’s the best offer we have available right now.

I hope you guys will come on board. Have a great day.

Says about the same thing without the sorrys and nos. 1st way: sorry, don’t, can’t, sorry. 2nd way: love, very happy, free time, on top, best offer, hope, great day. Tone makes all the difference in the world. Which way would you rather buy from?

A transcript of the most recent edition — “Episode #13: Addressing criticism of 37signals (Part 1 of 2)” — of the 37signals Podcast is now available.

This week we’ll be conducting interviews to be used in future podcasts with the design team and the support team here at 37signals. What question(s) would you like to hear them answer? Leave it in the comments (anonymous questions won’t get answered btw).

Recently saw this Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird in person at the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. Gorgeous lines on it. More photos/details and a video.

Struck me how it looks like something from the 1940s (in a Tucker kinda way) or modern (like a recent version of the Batmobile) but not like what I think of as a design typical of 1962, the year the plane first flew.

Former Air Force pilot Brian Shul calls it “the most remarkable airplane of the 20th century.” It remains the fastest and highest flying air-breathing production aircraft ever built. if a surface-to-air missile launch was detected, standard evasive action was simply to accelerate. On March 6, 1990, it made its final flight and set a record — Los Angeles to D.C. in 1 hour, 4 minutes.

Interesting story to how it was built too. Flying at over Mach 3 generates some high temperatures. So the plane was made from titanium. But it turns out titanium is a real pain.

Titanium was difficult to work with, expensive, and scarce. Initially, 80% of the titanium delivered to Lockheed was rejected due to metallurgical contamination. One example of the difficulties of working with titanium is that welds made at certain times of the year were more durable than welds made at other times. It was found that the manufacturing plant’s water came from one reservoir in the summer and another in the winter; the slight differences in the impurities in the water from these sources led to differences in the durability of the welds, since water was used to cool the titanium welds.

The titanium being manufactured in the United States in those days lacked the required purity. The only source of purer titanium available was located in the Soviet Union. So, according to the tour guide at the museum, the CIA set up dummy corporations in Europe and bought titanium from the Soviet Union. The Soviets had no idea they were helping the US build an aircraft that would be used to spy on them.

(Fyi, the plane was also the basis for the character Jetfire in “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.”)

Highlights from this week’s 37signals staff posts at Twitter.

rjs: Check out the bold black design at http://www.charlierose.com/ Dig the guest photos on the permas http://bit.ly/9DuVj9

dhh: The giants of tech are dominated by life’s-work founders: http://bit.ly/cFeqPT—not a lot of flippers in that hall of fame.

jasonfried: Notes by @lukewdesign about my talk at the Web App Masters Tour. http://bit.ly/9FkWgd #uiewamt

sh: Stop whatever you’re doing right now and tell someone you appreciate them. It will be good for you.

markimbriaco: Just had a great chat with @joshowens for the inaugural Webpulp.tv interview.

rjs: The perma pages on Bygone Bureau are beautiful http://bit.ly/8YQzy3 – @sleepoversf did the design http://bit.ly/9syeLx

dhh: Acquisition economics: AOL bought ICQ for $300-400M in 1998, sells it for $187M today. ~$400M loss with expenses? http://nyti.ms/bhbUTU

jasonfried: 93% of AAA-rated subprime-mortgage-backed securities issued in 2006 are now rated as junk: http://nyti.ms/9ElC5Y

j_m_williams: An ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness. —Elbert Hubbard

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Highrise
Tout lets you templatize your email campaigns and track the results in Highrise
Tired of re-writing the same e-mails? Tout lets you templatize your emails so you can reach out to potential customers, journalists, and bloggers faster and then analyze the results. And it now integrates with Highrise. That means the people you pitch to are automatically added to your Highrise address book.

Create customized letters for your Highrise contacts with LetterGenie
LetterGenie is a web-based program for creating customized letters using your existing contact database — and it integrates with Highrise.

[Case study] UK’s largest graduate job website uses Highrise to manage thousands of business contacts
“On our desktops, we have it hooked it into our VOIP phone system so we can just ‘click-to-dial’. It’s fast and easy. Using the iCal feeds, our tasks appear on our Google Calendar’s and iPhone calendars, so we’re always aware of what to do next. Integration with Mailchimp means we can see who received our newsletter and whether they opened it, right in Highrise. The export functions & API are very simple for extracting data, so we use these to make extra reports and spreadsheets when the need arises.”

How to export Highrise contacts by tag
“Can I select the contacts I want to export by tags?”The answer: Yes. When viewing a group of contacts filtered by tag, you can choose “Export contacts tagged…” at the top of the right sidebar to download a vCard containing just those contacts.

Basecamp
A preview of the new Basecamp messages and comments editor
The new editor (a WYSIWYG – “What You See Is What You Get” – editor) lets you turn text bold or italic without having to know the special “Textile” formatting codes you used to have to use. You can also create bullet lists and numbered lists by just clicking a button. No more battling with Basecamp just to make a bullet list or some bold text in a message.