Ten languages, not nine: correct the count everywhere
The picker offers English plus nine translations. I wrote it up as nine in total with eight unread, which is off by one in the direction that undercounts the work and, worse, misstates how many catalogues are waiting for a speaker to read them. Nine of the ten are machine-made and unread — all of them, not all but one — so the sentence that matters reads more sharply than the wrong version did, not less.
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@@ -27,7 +27,7 @@ works the same way — and dropped where 0.15 was the whole subject. Support for
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0.15 was removed on 2026-08-26; the last release that runs on it is tagged
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[`stalwart-0.15-support`](https://github.com/Coffey-Labs/ihasmail/releases/tag/stalwart-0.15-support).
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- **Eight of the nine interface languages have never been read by anybody who speaks them.** They were produced by AI against standard dictionaries on 2026-08-31 — German, Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Ukrainian, Simplified Chinese and Japanese — and every one is marked **Beta** in the picker, with that stated in Settings beside a link for reporting anything that reads wrongly. This is the entry that matters most on this page, because it is the one thing here that cannot be closed by testing: a translation can be complete, consistent, pass every check, and still read like a machine wrote it, and nobody on this project can tell which. What *is* verified is the machinery around them. A missing key renders its English source, so a bad line can simply be deleted; a stale key — one whose English no longer exists — is caught by `npm run i18n:check` rather than sitting in the file looking correct and never being looked up. Plurals are asked of `Intl.PluralRules` rather than assumed, which is why Russian and Ukrainian carry three forms and Japanese and Chinese carry one; supplying `one` for Japanese would have been filling in a distinction the language does not draw. Confirmed live on the deployed instance (2026-08-31) against a 6,289-message mailbox: role folders localise and the ~20 custom folders keep the names their owner gave them, dates and the calendar follow the language, and 6,289 renders as *6289 листувань* — the genitive plural a number ending in nine takes, which is the first time the plural machinery ran on anything but a hand-picked value.
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- **All nine translations have never been read by anybody who speaks them.** They were produced by AI against standard dictionaries on 2026-08-31 — German, Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Ukrainian, Simplified Chinese and Japanese, which with English makes ten languages in the picker — and every one of the nine is marked **Beta** in the picker, with that stated in Settings beside a link for reporting anything that reads wrongly. This is the entry that matters most on this page, because it is the one thing here that cannot be closed by testing: a translation can be complete, consistent, pass every check, and still read like a machine wrote it, and nobody on this project can tell which. What *is* verified is the machinery around them. A missing key renders its English source, so a bad line can simply be deleted; a stale key — one whose English no longer exists — is caught by `npm run i18n:check` rather than sitting in the file looking correct and never being looked up. Plurals are asked of `Intl.PluralRules` rather than assumed, which is why Russian and Ukrainian carry three forms and Japanese and Chinese carry one; supplying `one` for Japanese would have been filling in a distinction the language does not draw. Confirmed live on the deployed instance (2026-08-31) against a 6,289-message mailbox: role folders localise and the ~20 custom folders keep the names their owner gave them, dates and the calendar follow the language, and 6,289 renders as *6289 листувань* — the genitive plural a number ending in nine takes, which is the first time the plural machinery ran on anything but a hand-picked value.
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- **`npm run i18n:coverage` reported 100% while about two hundred strings rendered English in every language.** It reads JSX text, and it was not wrong about what it measured — none of them were JSX text. They were `toast.error(...)` arguments, `confirmDialog({ title, confirmLabel })` props, `title=` and `aria-label=` attributes, and template literals: every one built from an expression a codemod cannot read. The calendar's own view switcher was the clearest case, spelling its labels `v[0].toUpperCase() + v.slice(1)` — correct English, untranslatable anywhere else, and galling because **Day**, **Week**, **Month** and **Agenda** were already in all nine catalogues and the buttons simply never asked for them. Reported from production, where the switcher stayed English in a Japanese interface. All of them are now wrapped, and `npm run i18n:check` grew a second half (`scripts/i18n-literals.mjs`) that accepts a string wrapped where it is written *or* present as a catalogue key — the constant-table convention, where `SECTIONS` holds `label: "About"` and the render site calls `t(s.label)` — and refuses one that is neither, because that is a string no catalogue can translate however many languages ship. It found twenty more than a hand sweep had. Worth recording as a general lesson rather than an i18n one: a coverage number measures the thing it can see, and the strings it cannot see are exactly the ones nobody is checking.
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