781 of 796 strings. Generated by AI, unreviewed, marked Beta.
The thing this catalogue had to avoid is the reason it took the work it did.
Ukrainian and Russian share a script and share a plural rule -- one, few,
many, with 11 counting as many and 21 counting as one -- and share almost
nothing else that matters in a mail client. «Вхідні» is not «Входящие»,
«Кошик» is not «Корзина», «Листування» is not «Цепочка». A Ukrainian
catalogue produced by adapting the Russian one would pass every structural
check in this repo and still be the wrong language, and a Ukrainian reader
would notice in the first sentence and would be right to resent it. The
vocabulary here was chosen against what Ukrainian software says, not against
the neighbouring file.
Two words worth naming: «тека» rather than «папка» for folder, which is the
form Ukrainian software settled on; and «мітка» for label rather than
Russian's «ярлык», which in Ukrainian means a shortcut and would be a small
false friend on every screen.
Plurals tested against the shipped catalogue at 1, 2, 4, 5, 11, 21 and 0, plus
the check that every counted string carries all four categories. A missing
"few" falls back to "other" silently and is grammatical often enough to go
unnoticed.
The cross-check that Ukrainian and Russian are actually different files is
worth having but cannot live here: Russian is still an open pull request, so
ru.ts does not exist on this branch. It belongs in a follow-up once both have
landed.
781 of 796 strings; the fifteen left are product names, bare URLs and example
addresses. Generated by AI, unreviewed, marked Beta.
This is Brazilian Portuguese specifically, and the tag says so rather than
claiming "Portuguese". It is not a stand-in for European Portuguese: the
vocabulary diverges in exactly the places a mail client lives -- arquivo
against ficheiro, tela against ecrã -- and offering one variety as though it
were the other is worse than offering English, because the reader cannot tell
it was not meant for them. A pt-PT catalogue would be a separate file.
Register is "você", and this is the one place Phase 1 deliberately breaks its
own rule. The other four all took the formal address; Brazilian Portuguese has
no comfortable equivalent. "O senhor" is deferential rather than merely polite
and reads as stiff or sarcastic in software, while "você" is the neutral
default Gmail, Outlook and every Brazilian bank use, carrying none of the
familiarity "du" or "tu" would elsewhere. Following the rule here would have
produced a worse translation by obeying a decision made about other languages.
The rule was always "address the reader the way the language does it", and
these five are what that looks like rather than five copies of one answer.
"Marcador" for label, which is Gmail's word in Brazil: a fourth different
outcome from the same rule about using what the reader will meet elsewhere,
after English, Libellé and Etiqueta.
Phase 1 is complete: de, fr, nl, es, pt-BR, each unreviewed and each marked
Beta until a speaker signs it off. That review is the part nobody has done and
the part that decides whether any of this was worth shipping.
781 of 796 strings; the fifteen left are product names, bare URLs and example
addresses. Generated by AI, unreviewed, marked Beta.
Register is "usted", following the other three. Spanish makes the decision
cheaper than they did: most of an interface is infinitives and nouns --
"Eliminar", "Configuración" -- where the question never arises. It only shows
in the sentences that address the reader directly, and those agree.
This is peninsular Spanish where the varieties diverge, chosen deliberately
rather than blended, because a blend reads worse than either. The file names
the differences that actually matter in a mail client -- "correo" over
"email", "ordenador" over "computadora" -- and notes that a Latin American
catalogue would be a copy of this one with those changed, not a fresh
translation. Worth writing down while the reasoning is fresh rather than
rediscovering it if es-419 is ever asked for.
"Etiqueta" for label, as in French: Gmail established it and a reader will
find it there. That is the third application of the same rule -- use what the
reader will meet elsewhere -- and the third different outcome, which is what
a rule looks like when it is doing work.
781 of 796 strings; the fifteen left are product names, bare URLs and example
addresses. Generated by AI, unreviewed, marked Beta, with the report link doing
the job a native speaker would.
Register is "u", following "Sie" and "vous". This is the one of the three most
likely to be overturned, and the file says so: Dutch leans informal further and
faster than German or French, and "je" is what most consumer software now uses.
It is written down as a single consistent choice precisely so that changing it
is a find-and-replace rather than an argument. Where a string can dodge the
question it does, which is ordinary good Dutch UI.
"Postvak IN" rather than "Inbox", because that is what Outlook and Thunderbird
call it in Dutch. "Label" stays English as in German -- no Dutch client
translates it -- which is the same rule that made French use "Libellé": use
what the reader will meet elsewhere, rather than always translating or never.
The folder-context separator needed inserting by script again, and in the
opposite way to French: there it arrived as a raw control byte and had to be
escaped, here it did not arrive at all. Both are the same underlying awkwardness
-- U+0004 does not survive being written into a file by hand -- and the
catalogue checker caught it both times by reporting the keys as stale, which is
exactly the silent failure it exists for.
Second of Phase 1. Generated by AI, unreviewed, marked Beta, with the report
link in Settings doing the job a native speaker would otherwise do. 781 of 796
strings; the fifteen left are product names, bare URLs and example addresses,
which should stay English.
Register is "vous", following the "Sie" decision and for the same reason: a
mail client a workplace deployed has no business addressing anybody as "tu".
One terminology decision goes the opposite way to German, deliberately.
"Label" stays English in German because no German client translates it, and
becomes "Libellé" in French because Gmail did and a French reader will meet it
there. The rule being followed is "use what the reader will find elsewhere",
not "always translate" or "never" -- which only looks inconsistent if the rule
is mistaken for the outcome.
French typography: the narrow no-break space before ? ! and : is the rule and
is deliberately not used. It is invisible in a diff, trivially lost in an
editor, and no French webmail actually ships it. Guillemets are used, because
those are visible and do read as wrong when missing.
Two things worth recording from doing this a second time.
The folder-context separator arrived as a raw U+0004 byte rather than the
\\u0004 escape the German file uses. It would have worked -- TypeScript accepts
it -- and it is invisible in an editor and in a diff, which is exactly why the
German catalogue writes it as an escape. Converted, so both files say the same
thing in the same way.
And the language tests named a real language as their example of one that is
not shipped, so shipping German broke them, and shipping French broke them
again. Both times the failure was the test being out of date rather than
anything wrong. They derive an unshipped tag now, and assert over every shipped
language rather than a hardcoded pair, so the third and fourth languages will
not repeat it.
Answering "can we ask Stalwart to serve German folder names": no, and it would
not help if we could. The account locale exists in `x:AccountSettings`, and
ihasmail already reads it -- that is what "Your mail server reports German"
comes from -- but writing it needs `sysAccountSettingsSet`, which the built-in
user role does not carry; only an admin could. And even then it would change
nothing, because folder names are stored data written once when the account is
provisioned. No server renames them afterwards; every other client has them
mapped.
The role is the way through. JMAP tags the standard folders and ihasmail
already trusts the role over the name everywhere it matters, so the *displayed*
name can follow the interface language with nothing written to the server. A
folder somebody made and called "Newsletters" keeps that name: those are their
words, and translating them would name a folder they never created.
The cost is real and worth stating: Thunderbird on the same account still shows
"Deleted Items", because that is what the folder is called. Inside ihasmail it
stays consistent -- everything that names a folder goes through one function,
including the "moved to …" toast, which exists precisely so that message does
not name somewhere the reader cannot find. Renaming still edits the server's
own name, never the localised one.
Three things fell out of it.
The message list refreshed for ever after a language change, which is the one
somebody noticed. The root keys its tree on the language version, so a publish
remounts everything; remounting re-runs the effect that loads the account's
settings, which calls applyLang, which called setCatalog again -- with an
identical tag and an identical catalogue -- and publishing that non-change went
round again. setCatalog now returns early when nothing changed. Measured
rather than assumed: three consecutive five-second windows with no JMAP calls
at all, against a pre-change count that never settled.
Calendar months and weekdays stayed English, because formatting locale and
interface language are separate settings and only the first feeds Intl.
Keeping them separate is right -- German dates with an English interface is a
real preference -- but somebody who picks German and is shown "September" has
not got what they asked for. A chosen interface language now joins the
*automatic* chain ahead of the server and the browser. Setting a formatting
locale explicitly still wins, and English is not counted, so an English
interface on a German browser keeps German dates exactly as before.
And the Archive folder read "Archivieren", which is the verb. English uses one
word for the button and the folder; German does not, and neither does
"Important", which is also a priority tag. tc(context, source) keys the
catalogue on both and falls back to the plain English, which was right in
English all along -- the gettext approach, including the control character as
separator so no real string can collide.
The catalogue checker needed teaching about tc() twice: first it reported the
eight contextual entries as stale, then it asked for the plain fallbacks as
though they were a second obligation. A check that reports work which does not
exist gets switched off, which is worse than not having one.
The first language, and the first one where the honest thing to say is not
flattering: no native speaker has read it. That is stated in the app rather
than in a commit nobody reads, because it is the fact a reader needs to judge
what they are looking at. Somebody told a translation is unchecked forgives an
odd sentence and reports it; somebody told it was reviewed reasonably concludes
the product is sloppy. The setting carries a link straight to a report, which
is the whole review process here.
`beta` is a property of the language, not of the catalogue's completeness. A
file can be word-for-word finished and still read like a machine wrote it, and
that is what the flag marks. Removing it is a person's decision.
Register is "Sie", consistently, and written down in the file so the next
language and the next contributor inherit the decision rather than re-take it.
Thunderbird and Outlook use it; ihasmail is as often a company's mail as
somebody's own, where "du" from software the workplace deployed reads as
presumptuous. Where a string can dodge the question it does, which is ordinary
good German UI. The glossary at the top of the file fixes the vocabulary once
-- Posteingang, Papierkorb, Entwürfe, archivieren -- because inconsistency
reads as amateur far more than an imperfect word choice does. "Label" and
"Spam" stay English, since translating them would name things no German mail
client calls that.
766 of 781 strings. The fifteen left are product names, bare URLs and example
addresses, which should stay English and now do.
Two things this turned up that the earlier work had hidden:
Labels defined as module-level constants -- the entire settings navigation,
the theme cards, the swipe choices, the date formats, the sharing permissions
-- are evaluated once, before any catalogue loads, so they could only ever be
English. Nothing failed; the German build simply had an English sidebar. They
are translated where they render now, which keeps the constant as data and
makes its English text the key.
And the codemod's narrowed rule, which let it take 73 more strings last time,
was too broad after all: text stranded after an inline <a> or <strong> came
through as sentence fragments -- ", and what a new account starts on." Eight
of them, rebuilt with tNode so the sentence stays whole and the element is a
named hole a translator can move.
scripts/i18n-catalog-check.mjs is new and earned itself immediately: it found
three keys invented that the code never asks for, which is the silent failure
in a catalogue -- a translation that looks right, is never looked up, and
renders English for ever. It also had to be taught about t(variable), because
it cried wolf 33 times over the constants above, and a check that cries wolf
gets switched off.
Verified in the browser rather than only in tests, which is where the settings
sidebar being English was visible and nowhere else.
jcoffey-dev