Translating Caliper

Caliper is written in English and ready for any other language. Every string a person reads — in the app, and the metric names, style names and import reports the libraries produce — is looked up in Resources/en.lproj. Adding a language needs no code changes:

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

Then translate, in Resources/de.lproj:

File	Holds
Localizable.strings	every string in the app’s windows, menus, metric names and reports
Localizable.stringsdict	the strings that quote a count, where the plural forms are the language’s business
InfoPlist.strings	what macOS shows on Caliper’s behalf, before the app does

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 and what its arguments are.

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.

Leave alone the unit symbols in the menu bar — %, MB/s, W, RPM — and clock format codes. Sparkle’s update window is translated by Sparkle itself.

Checking it

make test runs LocalizationTests, which checks the catalogue against the source in both directions: nothing in the source is missing from it, and nothing in it is dead. It then says which lines, if any, your language is missing.

After adding strings to the source, a regenerated catalogue to copy new entries from is written to the temporary directory by:

CALIPER_DUMP_STRINGS=1 swift test