Let's keep pushing the ball. I had another look at your data files and noticed some other formats you use: JSON and javascript embedded in xml. I already noticed your json files some days ago and json2po, converter from translate-toolkit[1], looks like it suits the job. Use the filter option to pick the leaves you want to extract, e.g.: json2po --filter=History,Description -o hele.pot hele.json This only works with current git master[2] of translate-toolkit as i had to patch it and it got already merged upstream. You can only filter for key-names and not their position in the tree, but i guess that's not a problem for you. Javascript seems to be a bit trickier. The easiest solution i found: Extract the javascript parts with XSLT and let xgettext do the rest. xgettext doesn't support javascript (yet, there's an unmerged patch for it[3]), but you can get away with Python or Perl set as language. You have to mark strings with some kind of function like _(), otherwise it's not extractable (just how you would do in C++). Best you link the gettext function to it as well (don't know how you call C++ from js). xml sel -T -t -v '//action' -n mainmenu.xml |\ xgettext --language=perl -k_ -o js.pot - This will extract all _("strings") from javascript in an action-tag. You need xmlstarlet[4] for the XSLT part. This has some limitations, e.g. you can't use string concatenations like this one: _("Open "+url+"\n in default web browser.") The string needs to be constant. Format strings seem to be the alternative which can be easily added[5]. The translator can then move the special characters of the format string where they need to be in the translated string (that's why it's a bad idea to break it up in multiple strings). As you can see it gets complex quite easily. Still, it shouldn't be too hard to add it to your build system (i'm not familiar with premake, i might be wrong). [1] http://docs.translat...lkit/en/latest/ [2] https://github.com/translate/translate [3] http://lists.gnu.org...2/msg00012.html [4] http://xmlstar.sourceforge.net/ [5] http://stackoverflow...f-string-format