I have currently worked a lot with localization and stumbled upon some reallly annoying scenarios with .resx files. For ex. The localization vendor always worked with excel sheets and i could not find any easy way of bulk inserting the localized texts into the .resx editor that Visual Studio provides. The only way was to insert the texts by hand, this would not be that much work if the app would use 2 languages but if all the 27 languages (Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango” supports 27 languages) would be implemented. It would quickly become an enormous task.
I hade to resort to other products and im sure there are some really nice products that you have to pay for.
My ambition was however to find a free product.
After some searching i stumbled upon a little gem on codeplex, the Zeta Resource Editor http://zetaresourceeditor.codeplex.com/.
Screenshot - Zeta Resource Editor
The editor supports multiple languages open at the same time which makes it very simple and straight forward to work with. It also has the Excel Import/Export function that saved my life (at least some boring hours of copy pasteing).
There is also a function for translating texts through Bing or Google translate. I would suggest that you only use this function for those languages where you can make a decision if the translatio fits the context.
Screenshot - Zeta Resource Editor translate function
