Localizr gearing up for Launch

As some of you might know, I've been pretty busy recently working on a project called Localizr.com.

Localizr's goal is to ease localization processes in the games industry. During my 10 years of work experience in the games industry, game localization has been one of the most painful tasks. Typical localization processes involve the game developer, the publisher, one or more localization agencies and their respective translators and proof readers. As the lowest common denominator, Excel files are exchanged via Email between the individual parties to transfer textual assets and localizations.

If all goes well, the developer sends a single Excel file containing all textual assets. These assets are passed on to the publisher who in turn distributes them to his localization agencies of choice. The agencies hand the files to their translators who will translate the strings and hand the strings back to the agencies. Now it's the proof-readers turn to make sure that the translations properly match the source texts. Once all texts have been proof'ed, the proof-reader hands them back to the agency, who passes them to the publisher who, finally, sends the files to the developer.

So far so good. But now assume that the file has to be amended while it's in translation. How much fun to maintain all these different file versions! Or assume that a translator slightly changes the structure of the Excel file. Is your tool chain capable enough to cope with that change? Maybe a cell is inserted at the wrong location in the Excel sheet. Who's able to make sure that source and translated text still match up?

These are some of the reasons why I felt that there has to be a better way of localizing games. Localizr is our approach and has been well-received by both, publishers and localization agencies, during our closed beta test.

We're now gearing up for public availability of Localizr and have just launched our website. Have a look at Localizr.com and let us know what you think! Leave a comment or get in touch directly via our website or by sending a mail to bb (at) localizr.com.

I'll keep you updated while we're rolling out more features on our website. Once the product is live, we'll invite you to take it for a test ride!

genstrings / copystrings

Setting up an iPhone project I came across some weird behviour with genstrings / copystrings commands.

In principle, genstrings is responsible for searching your source code for macro statements of the form NSLocalizedString(@"keyword", @"description") and will place an entry in a (UTF-16) text file called Localized.strings for each macro it discovers.

Now if you use this command to generate the file, add it to your project, localize it (by Right-clicking on the file, choosing "Get Info" and "Make Localizable") everything works great. If, however, you create that file manually (in my case using TextWrangler) the copystrings command will fail during the build process. I'm quite sure that this is somehow related to file permissions on Mac OS X but couldn't quite figure out what was going wrong. After all, the file permissions that you could see in Finder were the same either way.

If anybody else came across this and solved it (got manual creation of that file to work), let me know!