If you use a Chinese, Japanese or Korean version of the Mac OS X operating system, you may have noticed that the filenames provided by the system are localized, at least under certain directories.

Pictures => 照片 Movies => 影片 Downloads => 下载 Etc… 等等…

If you also use software like VMware, or sometimes use the Terminal to manipulate these files, you can find it annoying that UTF-8 is still not supported everywhere…

You can duplicate the default system functionality of using english language (or roman character anyway) file names for your actual files, but then localize them so they aren’t so annoying to look at. For example, to make my Finance folder into my 财务 folder, I renamed the english version to “Finance.localized”, then created a .localized subfolder inside (mind the leading dot!) and then created a zn_CN.strings folder inside there. zh_CN.strings simply contains:

“Finance” = “财务”;

Restart your finder (killall Finder) or log out and log back in to see the changes. Enjoy your slightly more chinafied mac…

More information about the procedure is on the Mac Developer Connection website: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPFileSystem/Articles/DisplayNames.html

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