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.
nl.ts shipped without an entry in UI_LANGUAGES, so the language was never
offered: the catalogue built, every test passed, the coverage check reported
98%, and the picker did not list it. The entry was added by a text replacement
anchored on the French line, which does not exist on a branch cut from main, so
the replacement was a silent no-op.
A catalogue and a picker entry are two halves of one thing and either half
alone is dead weight, so the checker now verifies both directions -- a
catalogue with no entry, and an entry with no catalogue. Reverting the
one-line fix makes it fail, which is the only way to know a check works.
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.
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.
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.
Groundwork for un-shelving translations. Chrome's translator rewrites the
rendered DOM directly, wrapping text nodes in <font> elements React has never
heard of, and the next update can then call removeChild against a parent whose
children have moved (facebook/react#11538). This is the structural defence
against that, plus the setting the served language will read from.
The language setting is `uiLanguage`, and it is deliberately not the `locale`
field that already exists. That one is a formatting choice -- what calendar,
clock and numerals to use -- and folding the two together would silently
rewrite everybody's date format the first time they picked a language. German
dates with an English interface is a real preference, and so is the reverse.
It defaults to English when absent, which covers both a new account and every
settings file written before this, and Accept-Language is not consulted: a
served locale should be something the reader chose rather than something
guessed and then written down as though they had. Only languages with strings
shipped are offered, which today means English alone -- a picker entry without
a catalogue behind it would leave the page claiming a language it is not in,
which stops a reader translating a page they cannot read.
`<html lang>` is set where applyTheme is set: at store module load, from the
localStorage cache, before createRoot() has rendered anything. Not in an
effect -- a lang that is briefly wrong is enough to raise the translate prompt
on a page that needed none. There is no server-rendered alternative to reach
for here: ihasmail serves a static shell and holds no account state, and the
settings file lives in the reader's own JMAP Files, so reading it before the
page existed would mean authenticating to Stalwart on every page load. The
static lang="en" in index.html covers the first bytes; the store only ever
corrects a reader who chose otherwise. Both halves are tested.
translate="no" and class="notranslate" go on the narrow boundaries only:
rendered email bodies, raw message source, attachment text, the generated and
hand-edited Sieve, the brand and the login name. Not on <body> -- someone
whose language ihasmail does not speak yet should still be able to translate
the parts that are ours. Email bodies turn out to live in a shadow root, so
React never reconciles them and they were never a crash risk; the marker there
is about not rewriting what a sender actually wrote.
Twenty-four fragile interpolation points were found with the TypeScript
parser rather than grep, and fifteen refactored. Pluralisation and
"count + label" pairs are collapsed into a single expression so the text is a
lone child React updates with textContent, rather than a text node with
conditional siblings to insert around. One of them -- InviteCard's
{method === "REPLY" && organizer ? "" : ""} -- rendered an empty string either
way and is simply gone.
The boundary is scoped to the main content, so the header, folder tree and any
open composer sit outside it and survive independently. It recovers by
remounting the subtree, which costs nothing because everything inside
re-derives from the stores, and it logs at info rather than error: a reader
translating a page is expected and recovered from, and filing it as an error
would put an entry in every console-reading reporter for behaviour that
worked. It re-raises anything that is not a DOM mutation error, so a real bug
still surfaces as one, and it gives up after three attempts rather than
looping invisibly.
Worth recording: the crash could not be reproduced on React 19.2.8. Wrapping
207-249 React-managed text nodes in <font>, exactly as the translator does,
then driving in-place conditional toggles and navigations, left the app intact
with the boundary never firing. The original issue is from React 16 and the
reconciler has changed a great deal since. So this lands as defence whose
premise is weaker than assumed rather than as a fix for something observed
here, and the boundary is insurance rather than a load-bearing part. The
notranslate markers and the collapsed interpolations stand on their own merits
either way.
jcoffey-dev