Are there any good tools for iOS pseudo localization?

ios, localization

Solution

You can achieve this with the Translate Toolkit.

First you need to convert the .strings file to PO using the prop2po converter:

$ prop2po Localizable.strings en.po

This will create a PO file with the strings of the Localizable.strings file as source strings (in this case I'm using English as a source).

Once you have the PO file, rewrite it using podebug in the desired rewrite format.

$ podebug --rewrite=unicode en.po en_rewritten.po

Finally convert it back to the .strings format (note that you need to pass the original Localizable.strings file as a template):

$ po2prop en_rewritten.po rewritten.strings -t Localizable.strings

The resulting file will look something like this:

"Account: %@" = "Ȧƈƈǿŭƞŧ: %@";

"Add command" = "Ȧḓḓ ƈǿḿḿȧƞḓ";

"Add connection." = "Ȧḓḓ ƈǿƞƞḗƈŧīǿƞ."

Problem

I'd like to start seeing how comprehensive we've been in our iOS code at localizing strings. We're not ready to go to translators yet, but I'd like to start testing with pseudo localization. Automating this process in a Localizable.strings file should be easy enough, but I can't seem to find any tools that do it. Frankly, I'd be satisfied with a script that just changed all my strings to "NOT ENGLISH!" if such a thing exists.

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