Vernacular is a localization tool for developers. It currently is focused on providing a unified localization system for MonoTouch, Mono for Android, and Windows Phone.

Vernacular consists of two primary components:

• a tool for extracting strings and generating resource files
• a small library that applications can use to read localized strings

At Rdio, our mobile applications share a common C#/.NET core, but we ran into countless problems with sharing localized strings across the applications. We developed Vernacular to solve this problem.

Localization support is fairly poor and inconsistent across the dominant mobile phone platforms. For instance, Android and Windows Phone make localization a huge chore with generated code, naming of resources, and converters, and iPhone doesn't support plurals (providing only NSLocalizedString(message)).

Vernacular solves this by providing a gettext-inspired API for localizing strings directly within application code. It supports plurals and even genders.

While Vernacular is currently very useful, it is still under development. There are certainly some bugs, and this documentation is nowhere near complete.

Vernacular is licensed under the MIT X11 license. Copyright 2012 Rdio, Inc.