Samurai Coder

Mike Lee talks about localization in his blog and in the Delicious Monster blog.

Makes me think about language, minority, society and business.

LangSwitch 1.0.1 - MacUpdate:

LangSwitch gives you a simple GUI way to switch the localization for only the app you’re testing. It displays only the localizations avaiable for your app. Here’s an easy way to test your different localizations without the hassle. Oh, and did I forget to mention It’s Free!

Useful. A free plug-in from iLocalize developers is nice, too.

poEdit:

poEdit is cross-platform gettext catalogs (.po files) editor. It is built with wxWidgets toolkit and can run on any platform supported by it (although it was only tested on Unix with GTK+ and Windows). It aims to provide more convenient approach to editing catalogs than launching vi and editing the file by hand.

This is an editor for editing .po files, which are wildely used for tranlating text in various software. I don’t find any nicer editor for this purpose on the Mac platform. As far as I know, Drupal tranlation requires editing .po files.

Check out the GNU project page for gettext for further information.

Update: TextMate does have gettext bundle. But, I wanna see a dedicated Mac app for this purpose.

Nobuyuki “Nobi” Hayashi:

Internationalization happens at many different levels. It can start with correctly displaying the international characters as well as comfortably entering international characters and precisely searching international string.

It may sounds difficult but if you are using Cocoa or if you are following Apple’s advices [sic], you are almost done with this part. And once you are done with this part, the rest can be done much easier.

He interviews James Thomson, the author of DragThing, who suggests “Japanese, French and German” are worth localizing. Of course, DragThing isn’t the only successful app.

Of note, after I announced that I work on translation of TextMate, my job hunting has become easier and a small company asked me for my resumé. The number of the visitors to this website surged like crazy.

I’m sure he will discuss localization including the processes from finding a localizer and how to support international users in further details.

CocoaCast:

Our community is truly multinational, which makes the Episode 17 even more appropriate. We will talk about Localization and its implementation in Cocoa. We will discuss Localizing of Nib files, String Tables, and some advanced topics.

I’m watching the episode right now. A beneficial episode for me.