How does the App Work ?

Xlator is not an automatic translation program like Google translate or similar applications: it has no Arrtificial Intelligence or Linguistic processor...

The way Xlator works is simple : It gathers information from already translated sources such as Apps or Language files into a dictionary. You can perform a search for translations in such dictionaries including alternate translations (if several are founds). Once found you can copy and paste translations into your own project translations files including ones with pluralization, gender and size rules.

Xlator has been designed to translate user interface objects like menus items, buttons, placeholders, labels, messages... It won't translate full text files, it has simply not been designed for that and you will probably need a professional human translator for that.

What are language links ?

This feature can be a bit complex to understand. A language link just allow search to group languages resulting translations together.

Let's say your dictionary contains portuguese and brazilian portuguese languages. In your project, you just want to use portuguese but might want to show brazilian results if no portuguese results are found.

In the Languages preference, you just need to link the Brazilian Portuguese language to portuguese to achieve that.

This link feature is also useful for languages when coding are different (between your project and the dictionary). Typically, Xcode uses zh-hans and zh-hant in it's naming convention for chinese localized file while Lg files tend to use ISO code like zh-cn, zh-tw....

Tip for importing dictionaries

Xlator allows you to import dictionaries from a folder, including the root one. We don't advise to try to import from big folders (like Application, Xcode and Library folders) as it can take a long time to import files, it is resource consuming and will lead to slower searches when using the resulting dictionary. Doing a finer grained split of dictionaries and targetting your source of information is far more efficient.

However, we will provide a command line tool to create big dictionaries soon on our website.