Does Apple provide an index of localized terms that it uses?

At WWDC this year I went to the Localization Lab to get an answer to this question, since a bona fide answer from Apple was needed.

From one of their head cheeses in localization he told me that currently there are not any publicly available resources for download for iOS or Snow Leopard. He did tell me, though, that these resources were slated for release in the coming weeks after WWDC.

This answer will be updated when the information becomes available.

UPDATE 19 JUN 2012: Wow, it has been a whole year now! Obviously Apple didn't come through for us 'in a few weeks'. I did talk to them again this year and was given a contact to follow up with via email. I explained that they made a claim to have it last year and this was the response I got:

I did check with the documentation folks and found that they're still planning on doing this but it's fallen behind other priorities. If you haven't already done so, would you mind filing a bug report about this? That's one of the best ways to convey the desire to the appropriate people. While I've relayed this feedback to some people it's always best to have a bug report directly from folks outside of Apple. Feel free to forward me the bug number and I'll keep an eye on it.

Our best bet at this point is to keep filling bug reports so that this gets more attention. Just for the record, I did file a bug report last year.


It has been two and a half years since posting my radar, but Apple has finally posted its iOS glossaries:

You can download them from developer.apple.com, or use this link to quickly find them:

https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action?name=Glossaries%20-%20iOS

EDIT 29 FEB 2020: This link is still valid and the glossaries have been updated on 15 JAN 2020 with everything updated for iOS 13.3.


Apple provides a number of translation resources that you can download which may or may not be useful. One of these is AppleGlot, a tool for replacing strings in application resources. A number of XML-based glossaries for different languages are also available, but they're specific to AppleGlot. You may be able to make AppleGlot work for you, or you might just want to extract what you can from the language glossaries. AppleGlot and the glossaries were created to support translation of MacOS applications, so the terms are related to MacOS X and not iOS. Nevertheless, I think it's worth a look.