Lo and behold today I tried Xcode's export/import for the first time and used Xliffie for the external translating. Very convenient but a lot of crashes in XLiffie and Xcode. I got around the n issue by putting those strings in their own strings file with a unique table name. I only had three. I used NSLocalizedString(fooEnglish, tableName fooTable, comment:fooComment). It seems that straight-out-of-the-box Xcode's export/import function ignores uniquely named strings files and only export/imports the Localizable.strings file along with the Storyboard files. This works for me in this case because I am translating into two languages that I happen to know. However, if I was sending this out for professional translation, it would be an additional chore and expense to deal with these exceptions.