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EskeleEskele

Translating Eskele

The app is fully localisable and ships in English only. Adding a language is copying one directory and translating the right-hand side of each line — no code changes, and nothing in the build needs to be told the language exists.

Terminal window
cp -R Resources/en.lproj Resources/de.lproj

Then translate, in Resources/de.lproj:

File Holds
Localizable.strings every string in the app’s own windows, menus and labels
Localizable.stringsdict the strings that quote a count, where the number of plural forms is the language’s business rather than the sentence’s
InfoPlist.strings what macOS shows before the app does: the Automation consent prompt, and the Finder Services entry

In Localizable.strings the key on the left is the English text, and it is what the code looks the string up by — leave it exactly as it is and change only the value on the right. Each entry carries a note saying where it appears. An untranslated key falls back to English on its own, so a half-finished language works.

Localizable.stringsdict needs a thought rather than a translation. English declares one and other; give your language the categories it actually uses — zero, one, two, few, many, other — and only other is required.

Checking it

Section titled “Checking it”

make test checks the language the same way it checks the code:

  • every localisable string in the source has an English entry, named by file and line if it does not;
  • the English catalogue has nothing spare, so nobody translates dead text;
  • every other language holds exactly the keys English does, and names the missing ones if not.

To see what the catalogue would look like if it were generated from the source right now:

Terminal window
ESKELE_DUMP_STRINGS=1 swift test --filter everyLocalizableStringHasAnEnglishEntry

That writes /tmp/Eskele-Localizable.strings.

What is deliberately not translated

Section titled “What is deliberately not translated”

The --diagnose reports, the log messages, and the seeded badges.json, progress.json and Icons/README.txt templates all stay English. They are what you paste into a bug report or a shell, and a support conversation is worse when the output arrives in a language neither party shares.