Now the strings in my code and my image are localized into French as well and English, I can move on to the strings in the interface. So far the French nib is just a copy of The English nib, created when I made the French nib localization. I used nibtool to extract the strings before translation, and I use nibtool again to put the translated strings back.

To do this I fire up Terminal, cd to the French.lproj folder and use the following command line:

nibtool -w new.nib -d file.strings Random_Wok.nib

This creates a new nib file with the English strings replaced by French ones. I use the Finder to replace the old nib with the new one and I am done. Now my resources look like this:

But if I run the plug-in in French, some of the strings no longer fit:

This is unfortunately typical for English. With its huge vocabulary, English can take up as little as 50% of the space of other languages. So my nice tight interface needs adjusting.

And there is a problem with subversion. After checking all of this in I find that my repository does not contain the French files and the NoImage.tiff file is in both the localized and the main folder:

To fix this I do two subversion things: svn delete the extra TIFF and svn add the folder and its contents. Svnx could do the delete, but not the add. After a fair amount of trying things that did not consistently work, I eventually went to the command line, did a svn add of the French.lproj folder, then quit and relaunched Xcode, then finally did a commit. That worked and now everything is synchronized.

I fix the layout with IB, but don't neaten it up yet. That's because I want to run it past my translator again to make sure nothing weird has happened that I won't spot. Once the translator has OKed it, I'll peek the pixels and straighten everything.

And then there is the "Images Selected" binding. I have this set up with two display patterns, one for the number of images and one for the pluralization string. For French I have to put the second string in twice since both words gain an "s" in the plural:

When I come to add German, this will break. The German strings are "Bild ausgewählt" and "Bilder ausgewählt". There is an "er" added in the plural, not an "s". Japanese is easy: no plurals exist in the language. A better solution is to put both singular and plural strings in the strings file and do all of this in code.

The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.

Tags: Aperture, Plug-ins, Random Wok, Localization, Cocoa