Adding a Localized ServicesMenu.strings file

To localize this text, you will need to add a UTF-16 encoded strings file named ServicesMenu.strings to your application project or Automator workflow bundle resources (details on how to do this are below). This strings file will contain, for each service menu item you are providing, an entry that uses the default text as the key, and the translated text as the value. For each language you wish to support, you will provide a translated ServicesMenu.strings file in a language-specific project (.lproj) directory in your project resources. As an example, the French version of the ServicesMenu.strings file for the example service shown in Figure 1 with the Info.plist file described in Listing 1 would look something like Listing 2, and would be found in the Resources/fr.lproj directory in the example service's project bundle.

Listing 2  Example ServicesMenu.strings file.

/*     ServicesMenu.strings      Created on 3/12/10. */  "Apply Test Service" = "Appliquer Service Test";

If you are providing a service via an application, you will add your localized ServicesMenu.strings file to your application project via Xcode or other preferred localization management developer tool (such as AppleGlot). If you are providing a service from an Automator created workflow, you will need to manually add the strings files and .lproj resource directories to the workflow bundle. You can find Automator created workflow bundles in your home directory under ~/Library/Services.

Refreshing the Services menu

Once you have provided localized text for your service menu item title, you may need to refresh the Services menu list to see the changes. One way to refresh the list of services shown in the Services menu is by using the services debugging tool pbs. This is a command-line tool located in /System/Library/CoreServices that provides useful services debugging features, such as refreshing the list of services or printing out the current list of registered services. Listing 3 shows an example of a command-line you can enter into the Terminal application to refresh the list of services for English and French.

Listing 3  Example use of pbs to refresh services.

/System/Library/CoreServices/pbs -existing_languages en fr

More Information

For more information on Services, including details on other services properties in the Info.plist file, please see the Services Implementation Guide. For more information on Internationalization, Localization, bundles, resources and strings files, see the Internationalization Programming Topics guide.