Managing the localization of Java properties files

Question

I have a Web application written in Java that is targeting several countries, all of which speak different languages (and more often than not, several languages -- that's Europe for you).

We have a bunch of .properties files that hold the localized strings, and our current procedure is to e-mail the language-specific files to our partners for updating before doing major updates.

However, this process is rather error-prone, as sometimes people forget to translate new strings and sometimes new strings don't get added to every language file, thus small mistakes get through very easily.

Does anyone know of any existing software that could help us clear this mess?

At a bare minimum, I'm thinking of something that would allow you to load a master file (for example, in English), a localized file and then would highlight the keys that were added to or removed from the master file.

Answer 1

I've used Jinto for that purpose as well as EPFE (older version, haven't tried the newest one).

Both are Eclipse plug-ins, both are quite decent if you can get past the fact that they will reorder keys in your resource bundles. Then there's also Babel - I haven't tried it personally so I don't know how good it is.