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 (DeepL, Google Cloud Translate, etc.) work well, but even a generous free tier means an external dependency, an API key to manage, and a network round-trip for something that's ultimately just short UI strings. Downloading a pile of on-device language models "just in case" eats real disk space fast — Apple's Translation framework models are shared system-wide across apps, which helps, but they still add up if you're not paying attention. So the app leans entirely on Apple's Translation framework , downloading exactly one language pack at a time, on demand, and lets you delete it once you're done with that language. What it actually does Open a plist. Pick any Xcode .plist via a standard file importer. Choose which keys to translate. Originally I hardcoded it to look for a key called itemTitle , but that's obviously too narrow for anyone else's project — so it's now a comma-separated text field. Type itemTitle, title, label and it'll pick up all of them, anywhere in the plist's nested dictionaries and