Localite is an extension for Mozilla/Firefox that is designed to make it easier for people to translate other Mozilla/Firefox extensions into different languages. Previously, you had to screw around with Unicode text editors and worry about escaping the right characters, typing billions of <!ENTITY> tags, and stuff like that. Now all you have to do is load up the extension’s locale files (it gives the same interface for .properties and .dtd files), type the new text for each entity, save it, and repackage it yourself, or send the translated files back to the project owner.

It was originally developed as I found that people offering to translate Deepest Sender would suddenly go silent when I told them all the crap they had to do. So this aims to make it as simple as possible, in the hope that we’ll see a lot more translated extensions in the future.

Here’s a screenshot of Localite in action:

Note that Localite is still very, very early in development, and lacks a lot of features (I threw away 0.1.0 and rewrote 0.2.0 this afternoon). At this point it’s only intended to make it easy for end-users to localise files (not create them). I also can’t guarantee yet that it won’t hose the files you’re editing, so make sure to back them up beforehand.

Once installed, you can load Localite from the Tools menu in Firefox, or the Window menu in Mozilla. No real keyboard shortcuts, although Ctrl+Enter does the equivalent of pressing the Next button.