I Got Tired of Hand-Translating Xcode Plists, So I Built a Tiny Free Tool to Do It On-Device

If you've ever localized an iOS or macOS app, you know the drill: you've got a .plist file full of UI strings sitting in Base.lproj, and now you need the same file in fr.lproj, th.lproj, de.lproj... and so on for every language you support. You can pay for a translation service, hand it to a freelancer, or sit there manually retyping strings into fifteen copies of the same file. I didn't want to do any of those things, so I spent a day building pListTranslatorApp — a small SwiftUI macOS app that opens an Xcode plist, finds the string values you want translated, batch-translates them using Apple's built-in Translation framework, and writes out a ready-to-use localized plist. It's free, it runs entirely on-device, and it's now sitting on GitHub for anyone who wants it. The constraint that shaped the whole thing I'm developing on a MacBook Air with a 256GB SSD and 8GB of RAM — not a lot of headroom. That ruled out a couple of obvious approaches: Cloud translation APIs