Localization resource file formats: A beginner's guide

All localization resource file formats have one thing in common: they are all supported by LingoHub. Different platforms require different approaches to making your software world-ready (i18n), so there is a myriad of resource file formats in the localization (L10N) world that you need to be familiar with as a developer. This becomes especially relevant if you develop applications that are to be rolled out across many platforms.

Over the last few weeks, we blogged about a number of common localization resource file formats and how they are used in translation projects, what their characteristics are, and how they are formatted. How they work together with LingoHub is especially relevant, for example when it comes to contextual information like comments or placeholders in those files.

To sum up this blog series in an overview, here are once again the recent blog posts we published that outlined the core characteristics of common resource files used in localization for software, web and mobile apps. This can be a great starting point for you to look into these formats, feel free to comment your questions or share it with colleagues.

• Introduction (placeholders and comments)

• .resx and .resw files (e.g. Microsoft .NET)

• .resjson files (e.g. Microsoft Windows 8/RT/Mobile)

• .properties files (e.g. Java, FirefoxOS)

• .strings files (e.g. Apple iOS)

• .yaml files (e.g. Ruby/Rails)

• .ini files (e.g. Joomla, PHP)

We hope this is of help to you and your projects. We are going to return to this topic shortly with some other formats, however you can leave your comments and we can go into more detail or pick up a format that you are interested in, sooner. As we will outline in some business commentary soon, we advise to always aim for a multi-platform strategy, but more on that later.