Asked for in #167: a right-click on a mail that turns it into a calendar
entry, the way a bill or a task becomes a reminder. Nothing clever, and
deliberately so -- the subject becomes the title, the body becomes the
description, and the reader supplies the one thing the message cannot.
A due date is exactly that thing. "Due on the 14th" in an invoice is not
a date a parser could be trusted with, and a wrong guess quietly
scheduled is worse than no guess at all, so the editor opens on the next
half hour for an hour and the reader fixes it. Forward rather than now,
because a start time that has already passed by the time they press
Create is one more thing to correct.
The body is capped at 5000 characters. A newsletter is a message too,
and its whole body would be stored on the event, synced to every device,
and shown in a three-row textarea; what is worth keeping -- the amount,
the account, the address -- is near the top. The cut is marked, so a
truncated bill is not read as the whole of it.
One message only. The list menu acts on the selection everywhere else,
but there is no sensible event to make out of five mails, and the mobile
entry appears only when exactly one row is held.
The editor lives inside CalendarView and the reader is in the mail view
when they ask, so the draft waits in the calendar store until that view
mounts and takes it -- once, or it would reopen on every later visit.
It seeds a form rather than an event: the dialog still says New event
and still has to be pressed.
Called *Create event…* rather than "appointment", which is the word the
issue used: it opens the New event dialog, and each catalogue already
has its own settled noun for that -- Termin, événement, 日程.
Reachable three ways, since a phone has no right-click: the row context
menu, a message's ⋮, and the ⋮ of a held row on mobile. Hidden entirely
where the account has no calendar.
Two things the drill-down got wrong, both found on a phone-width window.
The folders did not line up. The rule that drops the twisty's 30px
gutter was hung on the rows offering a drill, so only folders with
children lost it -- they sat 18px left of every folder without any, and
the column of icons came apart. Whether a folder has children is not a
reason to hang it somewhere else. The class moves to the list, which is
what the indent is a property of; icons now share one column and labels
another, at every level and on the back row too.
There was no obvious way back out of the drawer. It covers the top bar
-- it is taller than it -- so the hamburger that opened it is
underneath, and pressing the same place again did nothing at all, since
that handler only ever set the drawer open. The dimmed strip beside the
drawer was the only exit, and nothing says so. There is now a close
where the hamburger was, moved by the same rule so it lands on exactly
the same pixels, and the hamburger itself toggles rather than only
opening. Escape closes it too, for a tablet with a keyboard.
Raising the top bar over the drawer instead would have been the smaller
change and is not available: the drawer is at 950 and a full-screen
composer at 800, so a top bar above the first is also above the second.
Three things the mobile interface got wrong, all of them measurable.
The folder tree spent its width on depth. Four levels down, the 16px
indent steps and the 18px twisty left a folder 85px of a 300px drawer to
print its name in, and the twisty had walked far enough right that
hitting it was luck -- a miss landed on the row, which is a link, so the
wrong tap also cost a navigation. Under 768px the tree is now a
drill-down: one level at a time, no indent, a back row above it, and a
chevron at the right edge that is the same size in the same place on
every row. Tapping the row still opens the folder; only the chevron
changes what the list shows. The tree is untouched above 768px, where a
wide sidebar can afford the indent and where dragging a folder onto
another folder -- still the only way to reparent one -- needs both of
them on screen at once.
Every control in the top bar was under the 44px a fingertip covers: the
icons at 36, the search filter at 30, the row menu at 24, and the
hamburger 6px from the bezel in the corner a thumb is worst at. They
keep the size they draw at and gain a transparent hit area, since
growing the boxes would reflow a bar with no room to give; rows grow for
real, because a 44px target inside a 36px row reaches into its
neighbours. The one exception is the row menu, held to 36px wide: at a
full 44 it overlapped the drill chevron by 4px, so its right edge
silently drilled instead.
Pinch was dead on the message list. `.msg-row` sets `touch-action:
pan-y` to feed the swipe gesture the horizontal movement the browser is
not using -- but naming any value drops every gesture not named, zoom
included. It worked on an open message and died on the list, which reads
as the zoom being broken at random rather than as a rule about rows.
`pan-y pinch-zoom` keeps the swipe and gives the zoom back.
`i18n:coverage` reported 100% while a hundred-odd strings rendered
English in every language. It was not wrong about what it measured: it
reads JSX text, and none of these were JSX text. They were toast
arguments, `confirmDialog({ title, confirmLabel })` props, `title=` and
`aria-label=` attributes, and template literals — every one built from an
expression the codemod cannot read.
176 source strings and 15 plural sets now go through t() and plural(),
translated into all nine languages. Where English put a word in a slot,
the sentence is spelled out per branch instead: `Filter ${verb}` became
"Filter saved" and "Filter created", because which word agrees with what,
and where it sits, is not a property English gets to decide for everyone.
Counts that were `${n} message${n === 1 ? "" : "s"}` are plural() calls,
so Russian and Ukrainian get three forms and Japanese and Chinese get the
one they actually have.
Two of the catalogue's own conventions were worth learning the hard way.
Plural entries are keyed on the English *other* form, not `one` — `one`
is a form English happens to have and Japanese does not. And a constant
table holding English that is translated at the render site is fine: the
literal is a key, not a leak.
Which is what the new check encodes. `scripts/i18n-literals.mjs` accepts
a string that is wrapped where it is written or is a catalogue key
somewhere, and refuses one that is neither — a string no catalogue can
translate, however many languages ship. It found twenty more than my own
sweep had, including the stale-folder toast seen in production. It runs
as part of `npm run i18n:check`.
Also fixed: the catalogue is now awaited before the first paint. The
tree is rebuilt when a catalogue lands, so components recover on their
own, but a string computed in an effect does not — a toast fired in that
gap is emitted in English and stays English. The wait costs nothing
visible, since the session bootstrap already shows a spinner and English
resolves immediately.
And the Japanese agenda title loses a space Japanese does not use:
"{date} からの予定" was written with the English habit of spacing around
a placeholder.
Three places built user-visible English out of expressions rather than
writing it as JSX text, so the extraction codemod never found them and
they stayed English in all nine languages — including the five that have
been in production for weeks.
The calendar view switcher was the worst of them: it spelled its labels
as `v[0].toUpperCase() + v.slice(1)`, which is correct English and
untranslatable anywhere else. Day, Week, Month and Agenda were already in
every catalogue, sitting unused, because the buttons never asked for
them. They now come from a Record<View, () => string>, so TypeScript
makes the map exhaustive and adding a view forces adding its label. The
labels are functions rather than values: a module-level object would
capture whichever language happened to load first and keep it.
The other two needed new source strings, added to all nine catalogues:
the composer's title for an untitled draft ("New message"), its status
line ("Sending…", "Saving…", "Error", "Saved {when}", "Unsaved"), and the
agenda view's own title ("Agenda from {date}").
This is not the whole of it. A sweep for the same shape — template
literals, toast arguments, and dialog props rather than JSX text — turns
up roughly a hundred more strings, mostly toasts and confirmation
dialogs. Those are a second extraction pass rather than a fix, and are
left for one.
781 strings, machine-made and marked Beta, on the same terms as the
languages before it: the report link stands in for the native speaker we
do not have, and a missing entry falls back to English.
Plurals: there are none. Intl.PluralRules("ja") returns `other` for every
number, so each counted string carries one form. Counters do the work a
plural would — 通 for messages, 件 for conversations and items — which is
why "{n} messages" and "{n} conversations" are separate entries rather
than one pattern. The number alone does not decide the word after it.
Register is です・ます throughout, with the pronoun dropped: where English
says "your mailbox" this file usually just says メールボックス. Buttons
are the bare noun or verb stem — 送信, 返信, 削除 — not a sentence, which
is what every other mail client the reader has used does.
Script mixing is deliberate. Kanji for the noun carrying the meaning,
katakana for the loanword the reader already knows (メール, フォルダー,
アーカイブ), hiragana between them. Long vowels keep their ー.
Verified against the mock server: role folders localise and custom ones
are untouched, dates follow the language, and "{used} of {total}" comes
out reordered as "2.0 GB 中 700 MB" rather than word-for-word.
781 strings, machine-made and marked Beta, on the same terms as the five
Phase 1 languages: the report link stands in for the native speaker we
do not have, and a missing entry falls back to English, so deleting a bad
line is a valid fix.
Two things differ in kind from the European catalogues, and the file
header records both so a later editor does not undo them.
Plurals: there are none. Intl.PluralRules("zh-Hans") returns `other` for
every number, so each counted string carries one form. Supplying `one`,
`few` or `many` would be filling in a distinction the language does not
draw, and none of them would ever be selected.
Script: this is Simplified, and the tag says so. A Traditional catalogue
would be a separate file rather than a character conversion of this one —
the vocabulary differs as much as the script does (软件/軟體, 文件/檔案),
and converting characters alone produces text that is readable and
obviously foreign.
Verified against the mock server: role folders localise and custom ones
are left alone, dates and the calendar follow the language, and the
catalogue code-splits into its own 41 kB chunk.
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. Generated by AI, unreviewed, marked Beta.
This is the catalogue plural() was designed for. Russian needs three forms
where English has two, and the choice is not a question about the number 1:
1 is "one", 2-4 are "few", 5-20 are "many", 11-14 are "many" despite ending in
1-4, and 21 is "one" again. Intl.PluralRules knows all of that; a two-form
assumption would have shipped "5 письмо" and read as machine output however
good the vocabulary was.
Tested against the shipped catalogue rather than a fixture -- 1, 2, 3, 5, 11,
21, 22, 25 and 0 -- plus a check that every counted string carries all four
categories, because a missing "few" falls back to "other" silently and is
grammatical often enough to go unnoticed.
"Выбрано: {n}" for the selection count rather than an agreeing form: the
impersonal construction sidesteps agreement entirely and is what Russian
interfaces actually do there.
Register is "вы", lowercase. Capitalised «Вы» is correspondence style and
reads as a letter rather than as software, so it would be a small constant
wrongness on every screen. Most of the interface avoids the question anyway,
because Russian UI convention is the infinitive for actions.
«Письмо» rather than «сообщение» for a mail message, which is what Russian
mail clients call one; «сообщение» reads as a chat message. «Ярлык» for label,
Gmail's word in Russian -- a fifth answer to the same rule about using what the
reader will meet elsewhere.
A stray CJK character got typed into one Russian sentence during drafting and
was caught by sweeping the file for anything outside the expected scripts. Not
a mistake a spellcheck would find, and not one a reader would forgive.
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