Interface strings¶

Portable copy of the FontLab writing guide's localization page of the same name, snapshot of 29 September 2026. The live page and the term tables it links to are in the vexy-fontlab-writing-styleguide repository; use newer supplied project data when it disagrees.

The localization principles say how a term is chosen and how long a label may be. This page covers the mechanics of a Qt catalog string that a reviewer must check whatever the language: mnemonics, shortcuts, placeholders, reused words, whitespace, framework strings and the strings that should never have been translatable. It draws on the localization literature the company keeps (Esselink, Uren, Roturier, Jiménez-Crespo, Microsoft's Developing International Software) and on the FontLab 9 review.

The English text is the key¶

Qt looks a translation up by context, source text and disambiguation comment. Rewording a shipped English string, even to fix a typo, orphans its translation in every catalog: the old entry becomes vanished and a new unfinished entry appears. A source edit therefore needs a behavioral reason, and the source review records it. When the English is wrong but the control's behavior is clear, translate the behavior and file the source defect; do not wait for the English to change.

Two English strings that differ only in a trailing space, an ellipsis or a capital are two entries. Keep the difference in the translation: the ellipsis announces a dialog, the trailing space means the application appends text.

One word, several meanings¶

None, All, Auto, Default, Copy, Scale, Fill and Close are nouns, verbs or adjectives depending on the control. German Keine or Kein follows the gender of a noun the string never mentions; Spanish primero, primera, primer agree with something off-screen. When one English entry serves several controls with different grammar, do not pick the form that fits most of them. Ask the developer for a disambiguation comment or a split string, and record the request in the source review. Until it lands, choose the form that fits the most visible control and note the compromise in the ledger.

The reverse failure is silent: two source strings in one context collapsing into one translation. Check that distinct actions remain distinguishable. French legitimately uses Annuler for both Cancel and Undo on different controls; assess the control and context rather than banning the platform term. The verification scripts flag duplicate targets within a context; treat each hit as a question, not an error, because Font and Fonts may legitimately share a form in a language without number agreement.

Mnemonics¶

An ampersand marks the mnemonic letter of a menu item, button or label. The German catalog carries about four hundred of them.

Preserve one mnemonic ampersand when the source label has one. Do not add a mnemonic to a label that has none. A literal ampersand in running text is written &&.
Choose a letter that exists in the translation. File takes D in Datei, not F. It need not be the first letter.
Keep the letter unique within its menu or dialog. Items inserted at runtime count: context menus, Show and Hide pairs, toggles. Only the running build shows these collisions, so review the working interface.
Prefer letters without descenders. The underline vanishes into g, j, p, q and y.
Avoid accented letters and letters that move between keyboard layouts.
Standard commands keep the letter the platform uses in that language. Check the localized operating system, not the English one.
If the translator comment fixes the mnemonic position, respect it or flag the string as impossible. Do not move the marker quietly.
Chinese, Japanese and Korean keep the source letter in parentheses after the translation: ファイル(F).

Shortcuts and key names¶

Never change a function-key combination. Change a letter or symbol combination only when the key cannot be typed on the local layout: @, $, {, }, [, ], \, ~ and | are the usual problems, and French keyboards need Shift for digits, so a Ctrl+digit shortcut needs testing. A changed shortcut is an engineering change: the label and the binding move together, and the change is recorded as a source defect, not a translation choice.

Key names come from the platform, not from the catalog: German Umschalt, French Maj, Polish Shift on both macOS and Windows. A shortcut named in prose (press Ctrl+Q) keeps the platform's spelling of the modifier.

Placeholders and assembled sentences¶

Qt's numbered placeholders (%1, %2, %L1, %n) may be reordered; anonymous %s may not. Reorder freely where target grammar needs it. Never change the placeholder syntax during a prose edit.

Which value fills %1 is fixed by the code. A translator cannot infer it from the sentence and cannot swap two values because the target reads better. Ask what each value is before translating the words between placeholders: %1 to %2 is a date range, a copy destination or a numeric span, and each takes a different preposition.

A placeholder that stands for a noun breaks agreement: This is not a valid %1, %1 already exists. Replace it? The adjective and the pronoun depend on a gender the string does not know. Recast as label and value (%1: invalid value), choose a verb that does not agree, or ask for one string per case. Report the source; do not guess.

A trailing space or a string that is obviously the first half of a sentence means the application assembles text at runtime. Verb-final German and case-marking Polish cannot survive that. When the prefix cannot be reordered, a colon rescues the grammar (Widerrufen: Ausschneiden), and the source review records the fragment. Punctuation may also be appended by code: check the running interface before adding or removing a final period, or the user sees two.

Plural forms¶

Qt numerus strings carry one form per Qt plural rule, which is not the CLDR category list. Polish has three Qt forms (1; 2 to 4 except 12 to 14; the rest) while CLDR has four, the fourth being fractions, which take the genitive singular. Test 0, 1, 2, 5, 12, 22 and 25 in every numerus string. Reject a one branch that prints a literal 1 in a language where one covers other values (French one includes 0). Keep an explicit =0 branch separate from the plural category when the source has one.

Whitespace, punctuation and literal characters¶

Keep leading and trailing spaces. A dropped trailing space before an inserted name glues two words on screen.
Keep ellipses and tab-separated shortcut suffixes.
Escape inner quotation marks as the file format requires, or use the target language's own marks: „…“ in German, « … » with no-break spaces in French, „…” in Polish.
Keep \n and \t. They are syntax.
Type diacritics as precomposed characters (NFC). Decomposed forms and presentation ligatures (ﬁ, ﬂ) break search, sorting and glyph lookup.

Strings that are not text¶

Leave untouched: date-pattern letters (dddd, yyyy), registry and preference keys, file and folder names, config-file names, internal command tokens, command-line switches, OpenType tags, glyph names, Python identifiers, paths and URLs. Treat a word in all capitals, a word with underscores and a run-together word as an identifier until an engineer confirms otherwise. Debug-only messages stay in English so a developer can read a bug report from any locale; if one reaches the catalog, mark it in the source review rather than translating it.

Accessibility and hidden strings¶

Tooltips, status tips, What's This text, accessible names and accessible descriptions are catalog strings the reviewer never sees on screen. They must be translated, and they must agree with the visible label they describe. A localized build is often less accessible than the English one for no better reason than that nobody looked.

Framework strings¶

Qt's own dialogs, button boxes and messages come from the qtbase_<code> catalog, not from FontLab's. A build that ships without it shows an English Cancel beside a German Öffnen. The release checklist includes the framework catalogs, and translators receive the framework's terms so that FontLab's strings match them: Abbrechen is Qt's word and the platform's, and the FontLab catalog uses it too.

Standard operating-system commands (Copy, Paste, Quit, Undo, Show in Finder, Preferences versus Settings) follow the localized platform. This is the one place where Apple and Microsoft rank above Glyphs and FontForge: users expect the OS word, and platform owners enforce it.

The product's voice and the company's voice¶

A catalog mixes messages in which the application speaks to the user with prose in which the company speaks. Cannot open %1 is the product; Thank you for trying FontLab is the company. Each has its own register in every language, and both arrive out of context. Identify which voice a string uses before choosing address, tense and warmth. Drop the first person from product messages, do not copy exclamation marks by reflex, and remove chatty openers where the target register is more formal.

Consistency the user can feel¶

A command and the dialog it opens share one wording: Save As… and its title bar are one translation. Menus and repeated controls give the whole product its coherence through repetition, so render them identically everywhere; a help paragraph may vary. Commands, buttons and status-bar texts each use one grammatical form throughout, following the target platform's convention (German infinitives for commands, Spanish infinitives, French infinitives for menu items and imperatives for steps). Every label quoted in the Help Panel or the manual is the label in the catalog, verified by script rather than memory.