Malagasy (Madagascar) style guide¶
Apply these local conventions alongside the house voice and localization review. Source acknowledgments are in credits.
Address and meaning¶
Use standard Malagasy. A widely understood regional word may be appropriate, but do not change variety casually within a product. The Mozilla community guide allows both formal and conversational phrasing when they fit the reader and preserve meaning. Use ianao for a single reader; capitalize it at the start of a sentence, not automatically in the middle.
The pronoun izy can refer to “he,” “she” or “it.” It is not a gendered word that must be banned from generic references. izy ireo makes a plural reference explicit. Keep the intended number of people and the antecedent clear; shortening a phrase must not change either.
Check roles as carefully as grammar. mpiasa means a worker or employee; mpampiasa can mean an employer. Do not replace employees with their employer in a survey description. A natural rewrite must preserve the actor, owner, object, condition and uncertainty, including whether a product was enabled, opened or signed into.
Use approved terminology and verify uncertain forms in a Malagasy reference. Retain an established technical borrowing where it helps the reader; French is not an automatic fallback for every missing Malagasy term. A translation must not silently change units: 24 bits and 24 bytes describe different quantities.
Commands, labels and states¶
An English verb can look identical in a command and an option label. Malagasy may require different forms. The Mozilla community guide distinguishes these examples:
| Use | Example |
|---|---|
| Option wording for selecting an image | Hifantina sary |
| Command to select an image | Fanteno ilay sary |
| Choose, as a command | Fidio |
| Click, as a command | Tsindrio |
Use the product's approved verb consistently. The Microsoft summary also uses Safidio ny for selection. These are contextual terminology choices, not permission to replace every pointer gesture with one word. Preserve the exact interface action, the named control and the order of steps.
Keep progress distinct from completion. A message about sending a file is not proof that sending finished. A message reporting that an application stopped responding is not an instruction to stop it. Test the complete message, including its actor and tense, rather than replacing a word from an English inclusion table.
Spelling, capitals and punctuation¶
Use sentence case for new headings, UI labels and column headings. Preserve capitals in proper names and literal labels. The supplied convention capitalizes day and month names and leaves seasons lowercase; verify the agreed calendar terminology. Do not copy English title case onto every word.
Keep meaningful hyphens and apostrophes, as in manam-bola, amin’ny and fitaovam-pamolavolana. Review the whole compound; do not replace all boundaries with a hyphen or remove an apostrophe as decoration. Keep filenames and identifiers exact, including a literal MS-DOS name.
Recognizable abbreviations can save space. The supplied convention omits a final abbreviation dot; RAD is an example. Do not add English plural endings to acronyms such as USB or LAN. Express number in the complete phrase: the distinction between rakitra and ireo rakitra must survive when it matters, even on a narrow screen.
Explain an unfamiliar acronym on first relevant use. The explanation describes its meaning, not just its letters. Apply punctuation: complete sentences take final punctuation; short labels do not. Use quotation marks for quotations and house formatting for UI references. Do not double every quotation mark unless the actual file format requires that escape.
Numbers and final review¶
The Mozilla guide's numeric convention uses a decimal comma and grouping dot, as in 5,25 cm and 1.526. Treat these as display examples and test the product's actual locale formatter. Preserve a literal version such as 4.2 and a required input syntax even when surrounding display numbers are localized.
Use sy for “and” in prose. Keep & in protected names, markup and literal tokens. Keep 30 cm or 20 °C together with a nonbreaking space. The strings 24-05-2024 and 08:20 contain no spaces; do not insert spaces into them to imitate a nonbreaking-space example.
Follow accessible content. Mention disability only when relevant, without equating health with the absence of disability. Preserve relevant ownership: replacing “their document” with “the document” can change the task. Test substituted values, count messages, labels, wrapping and screen-reader wording with a proficient Malagasy reviewer.