System Strings: iOS and OS X strings localized in 34 languages | Hacker News Reader

System Strings: iOS and OS X strings localized in 34 languages

oleganza.com

32 pointsoleganza17 comments

Just bought it. I figured for 1.99 it's worth a gamble. I can say it's quite useful for a lot of little words and error messages that you use repeatedly. It also oddly contains music genres such as Acid Jazz.

In some ways I think I'd prefer a bunch of json or csv files that I could programmatically access. But I'd say it's worth $1.99.

For a not quite as complete, yet good repo checkout theRails I18N repo which contains them all in yaml

https://github.com/svenfuchs/rails-i18n

See Danish translation for example https://github.com/svenfuchs/rails-i18n/blob/master/rails/lo...

> It also oddly contains music genres such as Acid Jazz.

Likely comes from iTunes.

Nitpicking, but on my Safari 6 this page doesn't render properly because I have 'Default' encoding selected. The page is authored as UTF-8 but doesn't declare that in the content-type header, doctype, or a meta tag.

Thanks, always forget about this one. Fixed.

The description isn't very detailed, but where do these strings come from, and what's the licence for using them?

These are just a dump of the .lproj/.strings on an OS X/iOS system. So technically, Apple owns the copyright on them, and this app is merely presenting them for educational purposes. Also, the licensing is dubious at best.

Microsoft provides standardized terminology collection in different languages, which is useful for UI translators http://www.microsoft.com/Language/en-US/Terminology.aspx (e.g. it's useful to know whether Microsoft translates "Start" button to Russian as "Старт" or "Пуск" -- without knowing the exact term, most translators will probably choose the former, while MS uses the latter).

I guess this app wants to provide similar collection, but for Apple's terminology.

I was thinking "why the hell isn't this a web app?", but that makes sense.

EDIT: Rogue question mark. I'm Ron Burgundy?

You can look at the strings, but thou shalt not use them or even memorize them.

I loved GitBox, so I'm more then willing to give this app the $2 benefit of the doubt, but the AppStore description doesn't do a great job describing what the app does. It's a list of common app phrases and terms in different languages, but does it localize your apps for you, or do you have to copy and paste the words out of the app?

It does not manage Localizable.strings (yet), but copy-paste is fairly efficient. It makes a copy of a complete line in .strings format: "key" = "value";

I think having a few samples of some strings (maybe "ok", "cancel", and a more complex string) would increase the number of purchasers. As it is now, I have no idea of the quality of the translation or even what languages are supported.

Other than that, looks like it could be useful.

Languages: all 34 in the iOS and OS X. Including two variants of English, Chinese and Portuguese.

String examples (in Spanish):

"A connection timeout occurred." = "Se ha excedido el tiempo de conexión.";

"A fair night" = "Una buena noche";

"Importing ‘%@’" = "Importando “%@”";

"“%@” does not appear to be a valid email address. Do you want to send it anyway?" = "“%@” no es una dirección de correo válida. ¿Desea enviar el mensaje de todos modos?";

Thanks for the comment. I've added a list of languages and some sample localizations in the app description.

Looks great. You've chosen some nice samples (like showing that format specifiers are handled).

Nice price point. I thought about going ahead and trying to get these myself, but it's hard not to just hand over the $2 and call it done.

Also, really like the simplicity of the interface. Can tell you took some time making a tool a developer would want.

Bought. Totally worth $10 imho.

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