If I copy something from textedit or web and paste it to localizable file it shows this compilation error. If I type those in localizable file it does not show any error. I am assuring you that I using the correct format and ';' in the file.
"New" = "New";
"In Progress" = "In Progress";
"Waiting" = "Waiting";
"Closed" = "Closed";
It seems like SVN is having some issue with this file. As it consider it to be a binary file. It is inserting a lot of non printable characters between each characters. I still couldn't find a proper solution. Just changing the Localizable.string files from production PC for avoiding any issue with it.
Update: Updating the SVN client (smartSVN) to the latest version solved the issue. It seems one of my colleague was using a older version. When he commited the change to localizable file it caused the error.