Multilingual App Toolkit FAQ & troubleshooting

No. One of the key benefits of the Toolkit is that .resw files in multiple languages are not required. The Toolkit manages and synchronizes your app's resources by using .xlf files. This removes the challenges associated with keeping content synchronized across multiple .resw files.

Projects that contain matching .resw and .xlf files cause the translations from the .xlf file to be ignored. When this happens, a warning is displayed during the build to let you know that the .xlf translations are not included in the final app. A .resw file and .xlf file match when they have a target language with the same language code. An example of a matching pair would be Strings\de-DE\Resources.resw and an <project-name>.de-DE.xlf file (containing target-language="de-DE").

You can, but we don't recommend it. If you want to include .resw files in multiple languages in your project and use the Toolkit, make sure you don't have matching .resw and .xlf files.

Try these steps.

• Make sure you select the project node, not the solution node, before opening the Tools menu.
• Confirm that the toolkit extension is installed by using the Visual Studio Extension Manager.
• Confirm that your project is a UWP project.

Confirm that you've enabled the MAT for your project. On the Tools menu, select Multilingual App Toolkit > Enable selection. If your project was enabled with a previous version, then disable and re-enable the MAT by using the Tools menu. This updates the project to work with the new version of the Toolkit.

Ensure that the "Build Task for all Visual Studio editions" component was installed. This build component is installed with the extension, but it can be manually deselected during the installation. This component is required to update the .xlf files and add the translation into the PRI file. When this component is installed and working correctly, you will see these build messages.

1> Multilingual App Toolkit build started.
1> Multilingual App Toolkit build completed successfully.

No XLIFF language files were found. The app will not contain any localized resources.

This message is displayed when the toolkit doesn't find any files in the project with an extension of .xlf. The toolkit generates and keeps these files in the MultilingualResources folder by default. They can be moved; but it's best to leave them in that folder because that allows the Multilingual Editor to locate the related metadata files.

If you manually exclude an .xlf file from the project, and then re-include it, the file type element may not be set correctly. In Visual Studio, select the file and check the Properties window. The file's Build Action should be set to XliffResource and Copy to Output Directory should be set to Do not copy. This is how the reference should look in your project file.

<XliffResource Include="MultilingualResources\<project-name>.fr-FR.xlf" />

Your default language Resources File (.resw) is your canonical "schema" of the strings that your app uses. Translated Resources Files can contain all, or a subset of, these strings.

When you build your project, your Resources Files and your .xlf files are synchronized.

• The .xlf files are updated to reflect any added or removed string, or added or removed Resources Files.
• The Resources Files are updated to reflected any translated strings in the .xlf files.

This is explained in detail in Use the Multilingual App Toolkit.

Before you can use the MAT effectively, your app needs to be localizable. This is explained in detail in Use the Multilingual App Toolkit.

Microsoft Translator is a cloud-based service that provides machine-based translation. Machine translation is ideal for gaining access to translation when human translation is not reasonable to obtain. You can learn more at Microsoft Translator.

The Toolkit uses the Microsoft Translator service to provide translation suggestions to you. You can see which languages are supported by Microsoft Translator when the Microsoft Translator icon is present in the Translation Languages dialog.

You can quickly translate your app using Microsoft Translator from within the Multilingual Editor by selecting a string and clicking Translate.

Pseudo language is an artificial modification of the software product intended to simulate real language localization. You can find more details about pseudo language and pseudo resource trackers in Use the Multilingual App Toolkit.

This is explained in Use the Multilingual App Toolkit.

This is explained in Use the Multilingual App Toolkit.

Open the .xlf file in the Multilingual Editor to see whether the translations are present. When strings in the default language .resw file are changed explicitly, any corresponding translations are removed from .xlf files. This is to ensure that a translation matches its source string. Translate the string(s) in the .xlf file(s), and rebuild to update the non-default language .resw file(s).

If your strings are translated in the .xlf file(s), but they're not appearing in your app, then rebuild your project to update the non-default language .resw file(s). Visual Studio optimizes the Build command to build only files that have changed since the last Build.

Check your language preference order. Ensure that the language you want to test is listed at the top of your language preference list in Settings.

Merge of Loc PRI file failed calling makepri.exe: "0x80004004"

This message can be displayed when the region format conflicts with the toolkit build operation. The workaround is to change your language in Settings to en-US while building.

Merge of Loc PRI file failed calling makepri.exe: "0x80004005"

This message can be displayed when the .xlf file contains an unsupported target language. For example, "zh-cht" is incorrect (change it to "zh-hant"), and "zh-chs" is incorrect (change it to "zh-hans").

Yes, you can turn on verbose logging in Visual Studio. Click Tools > Options > Projects and Solutions > Build and Run. Change MSBuild project build output verbosity from Minimal to Normal or higher.

Running MSBuild from the command line can also produce additional messages.

msbuild /t:rebuild <project-name>

The import process performs basic validation before importing. This ensures that the target culture information in the files being imported matches that in the existing .xlf files. Open the .xlf files in the Multilingual Editor and make sure that the culture information matches.

When you select Output: Mail recipient in the Export string resources dialog, the email includes a link to download and install the Multilingual App Toolkit (MAT). Your translator can still install the MAT standalone Multilingual Editor tool even without Windows 10, Windows 11 nor Visual Studio.

For more details, see Use the Multilingual App Toolkit.

The Multilingual App Toolkit doesn't use proprietary resource locking files. Instead, the XLIFF 1.2 tag <mrk> is added directly to the .xlf file to identify strings that are not modified during Machine Translation. This enables the XLIFF file to be self-contained, and allows for per-file based resource locking.

These extra support files are no longer needed and you can safely delete them if you have them.

The .tpx file provided an easy way to include the MarkupRules.xml and ResourcesLocks.xml files when the .xlf file was sent out for translation. This functionality is no longer required.

If you have translations in a .tpx file that you need to retrieve, simply rename the .tpx file extension to .zip. This will allow you to open and extract the contents with File Explorer or any .zip compatible tool.

Try these steps.

1. Add translations using one of the methods already described.
2. Dump the .pri file (see MakePri.exe command-line options) to see whether your translations are in the .pri file. Translations will appear with language code and translated value like this.

   <Candidate qualifiers="Language-QPS-PLOC" type="String">
       <Value>[!!_Ŝéãřćĥ_!!]</Value>
   </Candidate>
   

3. Build from a Command Prompt; the resulting error may have more details than what is reported in the build output.

Before you start the Microsoft Store Certification process, you must exclude the <project-name>.qps-ploc.xlf file from your project. Pseudo language is used to detect potential localizability issues or bugs, but it is not a valid Microsoft Store language. If it is not removed then your app will fail during the Microsoft Store Certification process.

The Multilingual App Toolkit Visual Studio (MAT VS) extension collects anonymous usage data and sends it to Microsoft servers to help improve our products and services. Telemetry is off by default and can be enabled or disabled at any time.

Usage data: This is anonymous information about what features are being used. For example: adding a new language to a MAT-enabled solution.

Configuration data: This is anonymous information regarding the version of MAT VS installed on and the version of Windows it is being run on.

Below is a concrete example of the data collected in the following format, Key / Value / Notes:

• AddLanguage / MachineID: xxxx / This is based on a hash of the network adapter NIC. It is not guaranteed to be unique.
• TimeStamp / 2022/01/07T22:04:45.0000000Z / Time event took place.
• MAT_Version / 4.1.02 / Version of MAT installed.
• Languages / fr,es,de/DE / List of languages added to project.

All data is collected using Application Insights and sent to Azure Log analytics. Data is retained for 90 days then deleted.

Related topics

• Use the Multilingual App Toolkit
• Microsoft Translator
• MakePri.exe command-line options