Pseudo-Localization

You are about to make your program translated. But are you sure it will work well after translation? For example, does your program support accented characters as found in French or German? Can it display Japanese ideograms? Want to have an idea of the look in Russian (Cyrillic)? What will your German dialogs look like (most German texts are significantly wider than their English source) ?

Pseudo-Localization helps you answer these questions without having to wait for translators to complete their job: it builds a translated executable where untranslated texts are modified to use characteristics of the target language. For instance, pseudo-localization to French will randomly add accents on top of vowels, such as found in French. Pseudo-localization to Russian turns your Latin script-based texts to Cyrillic,...

e.g.: Hello world might become Héèllò wörlld in French pseudo-localization. The text remain fairly readable but it shows the reaction of your program to unusual characters.


appTranslator pseudo-localized itself to French (Enlarge)

And if your application is Unicode-based, appTranslator will randomly turn convert texts to other scripts such (Greek, Cyrillic and Japanese) to help you check that your app can simultaneously display texts in different scripts.


Unicode-aware pseudo-localization uses multiple scripts

Want to give it a try? Easy: Just download the beta demo version.
For more info, look up Pseudo-Localization in appTranslator's Help Index.

Important Notes

1. In this DEMO beta version, only the menus are pseudo-localized. (You are a registered appTranslator user and you'd like a non-limited beta version? please contact me.)

2. In order to prevent breaking the project file in this beta version, pseudo-localization settings are saved in a separate file: project.apt.ini.

3. Hint for your Document/View-based MFC apps: In the String Table, make sure you set your document template string(s) (usually string #128) as 'do not translate' (or you translate it manually): pseudo-localizing it is not a good idea since it contains not so localizable info such as your file extension and file type registry info.

4. If you take pseudo-localization very seriously, you'll want to test pseudo-localized input as well.