About

Pseudoloc is a simple, command-line tool to pseudolocalize the resources within a 32-bit Windows DLL.

For serious use, I recommend a commercial tool such as Lingobit Localizer.

What is Pseudolocalization?

Pseudolocalization is an automated simulation of the localization process.  It is meant to test common localizability bugs in an application without requiring the full localization process and without requiring developers and testers to understand a new language.

To illustrate, pseudolocalization may translate this:

to this:

Per Developing International Software: 2nd Edition, the most common features of pseudolocalization are:

  1. Translation of string resources
  2. String-length extension
  3. Dialog box stretching
  4. Replacement of hot keys and shortcut keys

Pseudoloc Limitations

Pseudoloc has some serious limitations:

  1. Pseudoloc only pseudolocalizes some resource types such as string tables, dialog boxes, and 32-bit classic menus.
  2. Pseudoloc only performs translation, string-length extension, and dialog box stretching in the horizontal direction.
  3. Pseudoloc only works with 32-bit Windows resource DLLs.  If you are looking to pseudolocalize .NET resources, I recommend reading John Robbins’ article .NET Internationalization Utilities.

Usage

Usage is straightfoward.  Simply provide pseudoloc with the names of the source and destination DLLs for localization.

C:\> pseudoloc.exe src.dll dest.dll

Copyright

Pseudoloc is in the public domain.

Release News

  • 1.0: Released October 31, 2008.

Download

Version 1.0

Thanks

The following sites were very helpful when writing pseudoloc: