Marking some XIB/Storyboard strings as not localizable

I add a note "DNL" to the "Comment for Localizer" field in the identity tab. Then, I run this command to automatically remove all of those elements from the XLIFF:

xmlstarlet ed -d "//*[contains(text(), 'Note = \"DNL\"')]/.." en.xliff > out.xliff

Basically, it's using xmlstarlet (which can be downloaded via homebrew) to find all elements that contain the text Note = "DNL", and then deleting the parent of that element from the XLIFF.

Combined with using xcodebuild -exportLocalizations, you can make a pretty simple script for generating your XLIFFs:

xcodebuild -exportLocalizations -localizationPath build -project ProjectName.xcodeproj
xmlstarlet ed -d "//*[contains(text(), 'Note = \"DNL\"')]/.." build/en.xliff > build/out.xliff 

It turns out the localization export from Xcode ignores attributed strings in the storyboard.

So just set the type of text for every label/button you want to exclude to Attributed in the Attributes Inspector.

This will give you an attributed string rather than a plain string, which as far as I know has no implications, apart from the (empty) list of attributes that has to be kept in memory now.

This is now possible using the BartyCrouch command line utility which I recently wrote to solve this problem (see installation instructions in my answer on that thread).

BartyCrouch runs ibtool for you and does additional processing on top of its resulting .strings file. It will exclude views from translation if you include #bc-ignore! into your value or comment within your base internationalized Storyboard/XIB file.

Please check out out the related section within the README on GitHub for detailed information.