LiveWall is a small Mac app that turns videos into your desktop wallpaper. It’s a niche tool, so we could have shipped it in English only. We shipped it in 15 languages instead, and the App Store page too. Here is why, and how we keep 15 languages from turning into 15 sources of bugs.
Which languages, and why these
English, Ukrainian, Czech, German, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Turkish, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese. It’s the set of official VS Code language packs, minus Russian: a list we already rely on for developer tools. Our other Mac app, Brimline, uses the same list, so both products feel the same wherever you are.
It picks your language on its own
By default LiveWall follows the system language. If your exact variant isn’t there, it looks for the closest one — Taiwanese Chinese gets Traditional Chinese, European Portuguese gets Brazilian — and only then falls back to English. You can also pick a language by hand in Settings; it switches instantly, without a restart.
Small rules that matter
- No broken plurals. Instead of sentences like “1 videos”, units are short forms that don’t change (“5 min”) and counts sit after a “×”. It reads naturally in every language without per-language plural rules.
- Correct capitals. Upper-case text follows the rules of each language, so Turkish “i” becomes “İ”, not “I”.
- Word order is free. Placeholders are numbered, so a translation can put the number before or after the word.
- Brand words stay in English — “LiveWall” and “Pro” look the same everywhere.
How we keep it from breaking
A new piece of text can’t be added without all 15 translations — the helper script refuses it. A check in the build fails if any language is missing a string, has an extra or unused one, or uses a different placeholder format. And the smallest window size is tested in German and Hungarian, the two longest languages, so no button text gets cut off.
Honest about quality
The translations were made with AI and checked by our tooling for completeness and consistency, but not yet by native speakers. If a phrase sounds off in your language, tell us — it’s a one-line fix.
What you get
LiveWall speaks your language from the first launch, on macOS 14 and later, on Apple Silicon and Intel. It doesn’t need a network connection or an account, and it collects no data.