Bosnian (Bosnia and Herzegovina) style guide¶
Use this page with the house guide and localization review. These examples use Bosnian in Latin script. They illustrate language choices; verify product behavior, labels and substituted values before using them.
Voice and address¶
Write natural standard Bosnian for the task and audience. Technical help can be friendly while keeping precise terminology. Marketing can be playful when the claim supports it. Errors and possible-loss warnings need clear facts and useful next steps, rather than theatrical introductions or reassurance without evidence.
Prefer familiar wording when it keeps the same meaning. Preporučiti can replace a wordy expression for making a recommendation. Providing information, giving support and helping are not identical actions in every context. Do not replace each with pomoći automatically. A word’s length does not decide whether it is suitable.
Use the approved term for a feature or object. Računar need not become PC merely to shorten it, and a hard disk is not every kind of drive. Examples here use fajl consistently; check the product glossary before choosing between that and another established term. Do not apply English word-preference lists as if they were Bosnian grammar rules.
Address the reader with the formal plural in ordinary help: Otvorite fajl. A command label can use the singular imperative: Otvori. Keep the register consistent within the workflow. A first-person preference such as Zapamti moju lozinku is appropriate only when the control actually expresses the reader’s choice.
Use lowercase vi and vaš in general interface prose. Personally addressed correspondence can follow an agreed convention. Omit pronouns when the verb already identifies the actor, but retain them when they establish a contrast or ownership. Do not insert “we” merely to make a system operation sound personal; identify the actual actor when it matters.
Restructure an English sentence when it improves clarity. Literal translation is acceptable when it is both accurate and natural. Short sentences, passive constructions, conjunctions and fragments all have legitimate uses. Choose them for the information being conveyed, not to satisfy an absolute style ban.
Preserve the task¶
Check the action, object, actor, scope, condition and timing after each rewrite. A fluent sentence can still give the wrong instruction.
- A password retry does not automatically need a delay. Lozinka nije tačna. Pokušajte ponovo. Razlikuju se mala i velika slova. keeps retry and case sensitivity without adding “later” or requiring mixed-case passwords.
- A failed key operation does not establish an invalid key. Ključ proizvoda nije bilo moguće upotrijebiti. Provjerite ga i pokušajte ponovo. retains the failed attempt and the recovery step.
- Choosing photos, uploading them and publishing them are different actions. Odaberite fotografije koje želite učitati. must not become Objavite ove slike. just to sound shorter.
- A search with no results does not prove that the reader has not entered any data. Gradovi nisu pronađeni. and Još niste unijeli nijedan grad. report different conditions.
- Cancel does not save the work by itself. For a verified Otkaži button, Odaberite Otkaži, dovršite uređivanje i sačuvajte svoj rad. preserves all three actions.
- Protecting a touchscreen computer is not the same as protecting its screen. Keep both the protected device and the plurality of password gestures when the source specifies them.
Preserve permission in personalization requests. An instruction to allow an application to use data is not simply an invitation to personalize content. Keep the computer’s name distinct from the reader’s name, and keep the list of data categories accurate; changing “and” to “or” can change that list’s meaning.
A restart warning must identify the right object. Restarting a computer is not restarting one program. Preserve other affected users, unsaved work and the possibility of loss. Keep a required restart separate from a claim about who will initiate it.
Keep prerequisites attached to their result. Automatic movement after correcting invalid or missing properties must not become immediate movement or lose its destination. An error about creating bootable USB media must retain the bootable purpose. Watching a demonstration and performing its gestures are separate actions; Pogledajte snimak i ponovite prikazane pokrete. is suitable only when both are intended.
A tone edit must not invent a supported feature, remove a compatibility condition or turn uncertainty into certainty. For example, an Away status does not establish that a person definitely will not answer unless that is the product’s documented behavior.
Inclusive and accessible wording¶
Use a known person’s stated name and form of address. Bosnian has grammatical gender; do not infer personal identity from a username or a noun ending. A role can take an appropriate form such as direktorica, or a neutral description such as osoba when the person is unspecified.
Rephrase unnecessary gendered references without changing the number of people, their roles or their authority. Osoba s odgovarajućim pravima može postaviti lozinke drugih korisnika. retains permission and the affected accounts. Bosnian has no English-style articles: deleting “his” from “his document” is not replacing it with an article, and may remove necessary ownership information.
Mention disability when it matters to the task, using precise and respectful wording. Osoba s invaliditetom and osoba bez invaliditeta do not present one group as “normal.” Follow a known person’s preference where relevant. A neutral rewrite must not substitute a different condition or diagnosis.
Terminology changes must preserve technical meaning. A DMZ is not simply a sigurna mreža: that wording implies a security property without identifying the network’s role. Keep an approved term or explain the segment’s relationship to internal and external networks. NIST’s DMZ definitions distinguish that role; they do not justify a blanket “secure network” translation.
Use descriptive links and meaningful headings. Identify controls by labels, rather than color or position alone. Odaberite can cover several input methods; kliknite remains useful when teaching a specifically mouse-based operation. Do not erase a required gesture to avoid naming its input method.
Explain unfamiliar symbols and test assistive output. Keep literal operators, shortcuts and identifiers intact. A screen reader’s behavior depends on context and settings; it does not establish a universal ban on +, & or ~. Follow the shared accessible-content guidance.
Grammar, possession and counts¶
Agree adjectives with their nouns in gender, case and number: novi fajl, nova fascikla, novo okno. A standalone adjective needs context. Do not guess a neuter form for every unknown resource or reuse one inflected fragment in incompatible positions.
Use descriptors to keep names and labels literal: u programu FontLab, postavke programa FontLab. Inflect the surrounding prose instead of attaching an arbitrary suffix to a protected product name. An English noun sequence may need a case relationship or a descriptive phrase: smjer tabele is not mechanically interchangeable with an adjective derived from “table.”
Use svoj for possession by the sentence’s subject: Sačuvajte svoj fajl. With a different subject, another possessive can be needed: Server je odbio vaše korisničko ime. Omit a possessive only when the same ownership remains clear. Keep personal names, account names and filenames distinct.
Choose prepositions for the actual relation. Uvesti u and uvesti iz distinguish destination and source. A table mapping an English preposition to one Bosnian word cannot decide every context. Preserve the destination of an upgrade or the object of a connection, even if a shorter sentence sounds more conversational.
An infinitive is often concise after a modal verb, but da plus present tense is not categorically foreign to Bosnian. Hurija Imamović’s study of modal and phase-verb complements, pages 9–18, documents both constructions and differences by governing verb. For a direct instruction, Prvo zatvorite sve otvorene programe. can avoid an unnecessary modal without declaring an accepted construction wrong.
Aspect is not merely “once” versus “repeatedly.” Čitati and pročitati present an action differently, as do štampati and odštampati. Choose the intended process or completion. Preserve tense when the message distinguishes something underway, something completed and something that will happen later.
| Standalone count | Bosnian example |
|---|---|
| One | 1 fajl |
| Two, three or four | 2 fajla; 3 fajla; 4 fajla |
| Zero or five | 0 fajlova; 5 fajlova |
| Eleven through fourteen | 11 fajlova; 12 fajlova; 14 fajlova |
| Twenty-one or twenty-two | 21 fajl; 22 fajla |
These are standalone counts, not fragments for every sentence. Jedan je fajl sačuvan. Dva su fajla sačuvana. Sačuvano je pet fajlova. The complete sentence needs the appropriate agreement and case.
Use the project’s locale-aware plural mechanism. CLDR 48’s Bosnian cardinal rules distinguish one, few and other. Integer endings in 1 and 2–4 exclude 11 and 12–14 respectively; fractional digits also affect selection. Test 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 11, 12, 14, 21 and 22, plus supported decimals and visible trailing zeros. A category selects a message variant; it does not provide a complete grammatical sentence.
Interface wording and message states¶
Choose the form for the surface and the actual action. A command, an activity title and a status message are not equivalent because English uses similar words for all three.
| Purpose | Bosnian example |
|---|---|
| Command | Sačuvaj fajl |
| Instruction | Sačuvajte fajl. |
| Activity title | Čuvanje fajla |
| In progress | Fajl se čuva. |
| Completed | Fajl je sačuvan. |
| Attempt failed | Čuvanje fajla nije uspjelo. |
| Currently unavailable | Fajl nije moguće sačuvati. |
Keep a past failure distinct from current inability: Fajl nije bilo moguće otvoriti. and Fajl nije moguće otvoriti. do not make the same statement about timing. A failure is not necessarily an equipment defect, a condition blocking the entire application or a reason to reboot.
Name the known problem and give a supported next step. Nema dovoljno memorije. is not the same as insufficient disk space. Avoid blaming the reader or inventing an unverified cause. A passive or impersonal sentence is useful when it accurately expresses the event; retain the actor when the message identifies who canceled an operation.
Preserve placeholders exactly, including their type, delimiters and positional syntax. For a single known filename, Nije moguće pronaći fajl %s. retains %s and the singular object. Do not shorten the placeholder to %, turn Find into Open or assume that every string names a file. A character placeholder is not necessarily a letter. Test actual replacements, including long names and names containing punctuation.
Use sentence case for labels and headings, with exact proper names preserved. Referring to a control does not authorize changing its displayed wording, capitalization or ellipsis. Short labels can omit final punctuation; full explanatory sentences can take periods. A shorter fragment must retain the question or instruction’s meaning.
Keep versions, paths, identifiers and code in their required syntax. Verzija 4.2 preserves that version’s separator without claiming that all version schemes contain a period. Do not translate a protected name or change its letters to match local pronunciation.
Typography and notation¶
Preserve č, ć, đ, š, ž and Č, Ć, Đ, Š, Ž. Keep the distinct titlecase and all-capital forms of digraphs, such as Nj and NJ. Do not remove accents or substitute one letter for another to make a font sample look more uniform.
This guide uses “{filename}” for ordinary Bosnian double quotes. The current orthography reference, rules 379–380, permits several styles and distinguishes complete quotations from quoted fragments. A period is not always outside the closing quote. Keep code’s required straight quotes, and use house emphasis for exact interface labels.
Use a comma after a preceding condition: Ako želite nastaviti, sačuvajte fajl. A following purpose clause can remain unseparated in Sačuvajte fajl da biste nastavili. Do not turn that pattern into a rule banning commas in every following subordinate clause. Preserve inserted clauses and the relationships they express.
Use a colon to introduce an explanation or list. Do not insert one automatically between a verb and its ordinary object. Parentheses and fragments can be useful; shortening them must not delete a condition or change a question into permission to act.
The Bosnian orthography reference distinguishes numeric ranges and percent spacing from the imported supplier convention: 30–60 MB, 50%. If writing the range in words, use od 30 do 60 MB. These conventions differ from Croatian. A technical document following an SI notation specification may use a space before the percent sign; identify that convention and apply it consistently. See rules 206 and 354–355 of the orthography reference.
Keep values with measurement or currency symbols: 12,5 mm, 100 USD. Use a decimal comma in ordinary prose and consistent grouping, such as 100.000 for a grouped integer. Machine-readable numeric formats keep their required syntax. Nonbreaking spaces prevent unsuitable wrapping; they must not make long sentences unbreakable.
A range dash, a compound hyphen and mathematical minus have different functions. −18 °C uses U+2212 for minus. Do not reuse the prose dash as a universal arithmetic operator. A trailing ellipsis can be attached in a label such as Čuvanje…; spacing elsewhere depends on the omission’s role. The orthography reference records variation rather than one absolute ellipsis-spacing rule.
Keep abbreviation punctuation and internal spaces: npr., br., tj., i sl. Unit symbols such as s, min and h have their own notation. Check a title or abbreviation in context instead of applying a universal period rule. Explain an unfamiliar initialism when it helps the reader, without expanding every familiar term on every page.
Verify technical names rather than copying a supplier’s expansion. DNS means Domain Name System, as in RFC 1034. ISO is the short name of the International Organization for Standardization, not an acronym formed from “International Standards Organization”; see ISO’s explanation. Acronym inflection depends on its established reading and grammatical treatment. A descriptor can avoid forcing a suffix onto an unfamiliar literal value.
Keyboard, speech and review¶
Check access keys, key tips and command shortcuts in the current product on supported Bosnian keyboard layouts. Their resource syntax is platform-specific. Do not assume that every control needs a shortcut, that duplicate keys are always acceptable or that an old supplier table still describes the application.
Preserve actual key labels and distinguish combinations from successive key presses. Identify the numeric keypad when the action requires it. Test focus movement, arrow keys and ways to leave a control group instead of assuming that one navigation model fits every interface.
Keep small capitals distinct from lowercase. Mala slova does not identify a small-caps typography feature merely because its English name contains “small.” Use the approved FontLab glossary term and verify the feature being described.
For narration, use natural Bosnian and verify unfamiliar names and acronyms individually. Do not impose one local sound for every English letter or trust an inherited phonetic transcription without checking it. Use an established local pronunciation when appropriate, while preserving the written product name.
Read literal addresses clearly enough to recover their intended values. Do not automatically omit the protocol, path or dot when the listener needs to enter it. Align narration, captions and demonstrated actions, and choose timing for the actual medium. A fixed ten-second introduction or a ban on recaps is not a Bosnian language rule.
Have a proficient Bosnian reviewer check terminology, substitutions, case, counts and agreement. Verify fonts, exact character copying, narrow layouts, keyboard access and assistive output separately from grammatical review. Do not treat another locale’s rules or a translation-memory match as proof that the Bosnian text is ready.
Sources¶
Adapted from Microsoft’s Bosnian localization guidance and Mozilla-derived shared localization-review material, with source notices and adaptation terms recorded in credits. The adaptation consolidates advice, corrects changed meanings and unsupported absolutes, and applies house context. Linked primary references support selected factual checks. See credits for shared attribution.