`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 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.
jcoffey-dev