Generate a pseudo-locale from your Laravel lang file

What pseudo-localization catches

Pseudo-localization replaces real translations with a mechanical transformation of your source text. Your team can still read every screen, but the app behaves as if it were running in a foreign language. Three kinds of bug become visible at a glance:

• Hardcoded text. Every string that went through __() is wrapped in [!! … !!]. Plain English without markers never touched your lang files, which makes it a hardcoded string.
• Layouts that cannot grow. The padding makes each string longer by the percentage you choose, so buttons that overflow, labels that wrap onto a second line and table headers that get cut off show up before a real translation does it to you.
• Encoding and font problems. Accented letters such as å, ĝ and ɱ expose a font without the glyphs, a database column that is not UTF-8, or code that measures strings in bytes instead of characters.

What is kept intact

Only visible text is changed. Laravel placeholders like :name and :count keep their exact spelling, so replacements still work. Plural lines are split on the pipe the same way trans_choice() splits them, each form is transformed and marked on its own, and explicit conditions such as {0}, {1} and [2,*] stay at the start of their segment. HTML tags and their attributes, HTML entities like &, printf-style specifiers like %s and anything inside braces, such as {user} for a JavaScript i18n library, nested groups included, are copied byte for byte. Keys are never touched.

Using the output in Laravel

Treat the pseudo-locale as one more language. Save the output for every file of your source locale into a folder of its own, for example lang/en_XA/auth.php and lang/en_XA/messages.php, or as lang/en_XA.json for JSON strings. Then switch to it only in local development, for instance with a small middleware:

public function handle(Request $request, Closure $next): Response
{
    if (app()->isLocal() && $request->boolean('pseudo')) {
        App::setLocale('en_XA');
    }

    return $next($request);
}

Visit any page with ?pseudo=1 and click through it. Keys missing from the pseudo files fall back to your fallback locale and appear in plain English, which is a useful signal too: regenerate the files whenever you add strings.

One Laravel detail to know: trans_choice() picks plural forms from a fixed table of locale codes in MessageSelector, and en_XA is not in it, so every count returns the first form unless an explicit condition such as [2,*] matches. To exercise plural forms, name the folder after an English locale that is in the table and that you do not ship, such as en_ZW. The trans_choice() deep dive explains how that table works.

Common mistakes

Running pseudo-localization once and forgetting it is the most common one; the value comes from making it part of how you review new screens. The second is pseudo-localizing only some files: validation messages, emails and notifications live in their own lang files and need the same treatment. The third is reading markers too literally. A string without brackets is not always a hardcoded literal; it can also be text from the database or a third-party package. To find the literals directly in your templates, paste them into the Blade hardcoded string scanner or read how the Code Scanner finds hardcoded text across a whole project. Once real translations arrive, the lang file diff checks that they kept every placeholder and plural form.