If you have ever localised a Mac App, you must have went through translating all the default menu bar items like Copy, Paste, File, Edit. It’s not only repetitive, but also error prone, as there’s only 1 single correct answer for the translations – The translations every other app used, or the translations Apple used. The correct translation is however not very obvious.
Long long time ago, Apple used to provided AppleGlot, a tool to translate common strings. It is however no longer maintained and developers have to find their own way. Apple eventually provided dumps of their apps’ strings, that format is nothing near usable though.
In recent years, thanks to Kishikawa Katsumi, the data has been organised into the glorious AppleLocalization.com, anyone can search for Apple-endorsed terms easily and that was a big improvement! But that wasn’t enough to make localisation smooth, there’s still a lot of search-copy-paste.
With Xliffie 2.0, the last piece of puzzle is now fitted into place.
I’ve split AppleLocalization.com’s database into many small SQLite databases by locale, now Xliffie 2.0 can download these glossary databases and utilise them for localisation. Since the search is all local, users don’t have to worry about sending their secret strings to somebody else.
Just a few click and you’ll have databases of over 4 million records. Various improvements has also been done on the database generation, everything is opensourced so you can also see how is it generated. You can read more about it here.