Catalan style guide

Use this page with the house style guide and the localization review. It is guidance for Catalan copy, not a substitute for the terminology approved for a product.

Voice, terminology and inclusion

Write for the task at hand: direct, calm and specific. Put the action before the explanation, use familiar words where they are precise, and avoid literal English syntax. Desa els canvis is clearer than a nominalised instruction. Match the product's established address: tu and vosaltres can suit a consumer flow, while vós may suit a formal service. Do not change address halfway through a journey.

Use the approved term when one exists. A term can vary with its role: carregar may describe loading, penjar or pujar may be suitable in explanatory copy about uploading, and the UI label must use the product's chosen term. Prefer a short, natural wording over an invented calque, but do not replace a protected label merely to avoid repetition. Check the term base before deciding between forms such as correu, correu electrònic, fitxer, arxiu, desar and guardar.

Name a control exactly as it appears in the interface. In prose, integrate a product or application name as the sentence requires; do not impose one article before every name. Preserve trademarks, filenames, commands, APIs and placeholders exactly. Explain an English-only label at first use when that will help the reader:

Selecciona Save (Desa) per conservar els canvis.

Refer to people by role, action or a collective when the person is not known. El personal de desenvolupament, qui administra el compte and les persones usuàries usually avoid a generic masculine without making the sentence cumbersome. Use a real person's stated name and pronouns. Do not alter legally defined roles, customer data, policy language or quoted text for an inclusive rewrite.

Describe disability only when it matters to the task. Use people-first, neutral language and device-neutral instructions: selecciona, obre or activa works across mouse, touch, keyboard and assistive technology better than a mouse-only instruction.

Spelling, punctuation and typography

Follow current Institut d'Estudis Catalans orthography and the product terminology policy. Accents remain in capitals: ÀREA, PÀGINA and ÚS are not optional. Keep the middle dot in words such as col·lecció and instal·lar. Preserve the distinction between apostrophe, straight quote and typographic apostrophe in source strings and code.

The current set of diacritic accents is limited: bé, déu, és, mà, més, món, pèl, què, sé, sí, sòl, són, té, ús and vós. Do not add an accent by analogy. Derived forms normally lose it; consult the authority or term base for a form that changes through hyphenation or composition.

Apply hyphen, prefix and doubled r rules to the actual word, not to a copied template. A prefix can change r to rr, as in arrítmia and corresponsable. Lexicalised compounds, names, symbols, capitals and words that already contain a hyphen need different treatment. Do not silently turn a visible product string into a new compound: retain an identifier, option name or branded spelling as supplied and explain it in surrounding Catalan.

Use sentence case for headings, commands and UI labels unless the product itself uses another protected form. Catalan generally uses fewer capitals than English. Capitalise proper names, acronyms and the first word where grammar requires it; keep ordinary days, months, languages and common interface nouns lower case.

Use punctuation to make structure clear, not to imitate the English source. Choose quotation marks according to the publication's typographic convention and retain literal quotation characters inside code or data. An ellipsis is a single character (…) in editorial text when the product supports it; do not use it to hide required text. A non-breaking space is U+00A0. Use it only where the output format, formatter or layout needs it; it is not a visual substitute for a degree sign or ordinal marker.

Grammar and register

Translate meaning and relationship, not word order. Make the actor and outcome clear in warnings, confirmations and help text:

No s'ha pogut desar el fitxer. Comprova els permisos i torna-ho a provar.

Use the imperative for a direct action, and an infinitive only where the surrounding interface convention calls for it. Keep negation close to the action. Avoid a long chain of abstract nouns when a verb says what happens.

Choose articles, possessives and weak pronouns in context. Catalan often uses the definite article where English uses a possessive: Obre el fitxer can be preferable to Obre el teu fitxer when ownership adds nothing. Use an article with an application name where the sentence and established usage call for one, rather than applying an automatic rule to every program name.

The personal a with a direct object is contextual. Review specificity, animacy and the whole construction; do not add or remove it through a blanket find-and-replace. Likewise, use per and per a, relative pronouns and weak pronouns according to the sentence, not a source-language template.

The simple past is a valid Catalan form. Choose it, the compound past or another construction for the register, region, chronology and product voice. Do not reject a correct simple-past form merely because an older supplier summary did so.

Numbers, units and identifiers

Use the locale and product formatter for dates, times, currency and dynamic quantities. Do not type separators by hand in a translated string when code supplies the value. Keep placeholders byte-for-byte unchanged: %d, %s, %1, {name} and {{count}} are data, not prose.

Write a number and unit with the spacing required by the output and unit convention, and keep the unit symbol unchanged. Distinguish bytes from bits: MB is megabytes; Mbit is megabits. Do not use an old label such as mb/s to mean megabits per second. Retain an existing UI unit only after confirming its technical meaning and compatibility requirement.

Use standard abbreviations only where space or the product convention justifies them. Ordinal formats such as 1r and 1a are conventional; superscript forms are optional typographic treatment, not a different value. Never replace an ordinal indicator with a degree sign. Expand an unfamiliar acronym on first explanatory use when space permits, but preserve an API, protocol or filename exactly. DNS means Domain Name System, not a server in general.

Treat paths, URLs, shell commands, keyboard shortcuts, product keys and code as protected tokens. Do not translate their syntax, change case or insert spaces. Localise the instruction around them and test the exact string in the product:

Prem Ctrl+S per desar el document.

A physical keyboard can display another label, so validate a shortcut against the actual supported layout rather than translating a historical key-name table.

Interface, messages and interaction

Keep controls, results and actions distinct. A button can say Desa; a status can say S'han desat els canvis; an error should say what failed and what the reader can do next. Do not turn an action into a state, or a state into an instruction.

Use the product's established translation for recurring concepts. If a string has no approved translation, record the decision so adjacent screens do not drift. Preserve variables, markup, access keys, message-format syntax and inline code exactly. Test plural and gender variants with realistic values rather than reviewing only the source sentence.

Avoid vague warnings. State the consequence when known, the recovery action when available, and the point at which data may be lost:

Si tanques ara, es perdran els canvis que no s'hagin desat.

Do not promise success before the operation completes. For irreversible actions, name the affected object and offer the available safe alternative.

Accessibility and final review

Write headings that describe their section and link text that identifies its destination. Do not use fes clic aquí without a destination. Keep instructions usable by keyboard, touch and screen-reader users. Explain symbols in words where the symbol alone would be ambiguous, and do not rely on colour, position or a screenshot as the only cue.

Before approval, check the rendered interface as well as the text:

• compare every control reference with the current UI;
• check accents, middle dots, apostrophes, quotations and protected tokens;
• test placeholders, counts, truncation and error states with real values;
• confirm number, unit and date formatting in the target runtime;
• read critical instructions in context, including with assistive technology where available.

A linguistic pass cannot prove that a string is wired to the right action. Record product-specific terminology and unresolved questions for the next reviewer.