Developer tool for i18n: “Pseudolocale”

While browsing for some internationalisation/localisation features, I found an interesting piece of functionality in Android's developer documentation. I'll quote it here:

A pseudolocale is a locale that is designed to simulate characteristics of languages that cause UI, layout, and other translation-related problems when an app is translated.

I've now implemented this for applications and libraries that use gettext, as an LD_PRELOAD library, available from this repository.


The current implementation can highlight a number of potential problems (paraphrasing the Android documentation again):

- String concatenation, which displays as one message split across 2 or more brackets.
- Hard-coded strings, which cannot be sent to translation, display as unaccented text in the pseudolocale to make them easy to notice.
- Right-to-left (RTL) problems such as elements not being mirrored.

Our old friend, Office Runner 

Testing brought some unexpected results :)