Romanian (Romania) style guide¶
Use this page with the house guide and localization review. Examples use Romanian for Romania. Verify actual product terminology, labels and behavior before adopting them. Source acknowledgments are in credits.
Voice and form of address¶
Write clear Romanian for the reader’s task. Use familiar words where they preserve the technical meaning. Short sentences and fragments can help readers scan, but a condition or warning must remain complete. A dictionary establishes spelling and grammatical forms; inclusion does not make a word the best choice for a particular audience.
Use polite plural instructions in this guide’s procedural examples: Deschideți fișierul. A product may adopt familiar singular commands, such as Deschide or Salvează, if that register is specified consistently. Microsoft’s plural-imperative preference and Mozilla’s familiar-singular preference are different house choices, not competing definitions of grammatical Romanian. Match the actual interface when naming a command.
Omit an unnecessary subject pronoun when the verb already identifies the reader. Keep dumneavoastră or another form of address when the reference needs it. Personally addressed correspondence can follow its agreed capitalization and register. Do not alternate between tu and polite plural forms without a reason.
Prefer direct wording, such as puteți instead of a long phrase about having the possibility. But choosing, selecting, opening and starting remain different actions. Alegeți, selectați, accesați and porniți require context. Likewise, signing in and connecting a device or service must not become indistinguishable through automatic replacement.
Preserve the strength of a request. “Make sure” can require verification, whereas nu uitați asks the reader to remember. For “you do not need to,” nu este nevoie să makes the absence of a requirement clear; do not accidentally express a prohibition. A suggestion to consider something must not become an unsupported recommendation.
Translate an idiom’s meaning without inventing a benefit or minimizing a failure. Calling an unknown problem o mică problemă asserts that it is small. A phrase about catching air while skiing need not become either breathing fresh air or a claim that every photograph is breathtaking. Rewrite the intended experience only when it remains accurate.
Keep an article’s promise grammatical and specific. For an explanation of two methods, use Acest articol explică ambele metode. Do not leave two competing drafts spliced together. Retain the named platform or kind of link when the source specifies it.
Preserve actions, conditions and scope¶
Compare the action, object, actor, timing, condition, uncertainty and quantity after rewriting. Fluent wording can still change the task.
- Preserve case sensitivity without requiring mixed case: Parola nu este corectă. Încercați din nou. Parolele fac diferența între literele mari și mici.
- A failed attempt does not prove an incorrect product key: Cheia produsului nu a funcționat. Verificați-o și încercați din nou.
- If the verified Anulați button returns to editing, retain the later save: Selectați Anulați, terminați editarea și salvați modificările. Cancel itself need not save anything.
- Keep a continuation question as a question: Doriți să continuați?
- Preserve the source upload limit: Puteți încărca maximum 100 MB. Do not change the number, unit or inclusive maximum while making the copy conversational.
Keep the restart actor. An installer needing a restart is not the same as updates restarting or the whole computer necessarily restarting. A supported promise to resume should retain the previous stopping point. A computer restart warning must preserve other people using that computer, possible loss and unsaved work.
A document moving automatically to a library and folder must still move to both, after the invalid or missing properties have been corrected. Și and sau do not express the same relationship. A failure to find downloaded files needed for bootable media must retain the files and their purpose, even after an alarming interjection is removed.
A picture password protects the specified touchscreen computer, not an unspecified collection of computers. Preserve the reader’s choice of picture and gestures. Watching the replay and tracing the gestures are separate actions: Urmăriți reluarea și trasați gesturile prezentate în imagine. Keep any required sequence and number of gestures.
Keep permission to provide personalized content as permission. Identify the computer’s location and name, the account’s picture and the domain information separately. Do not move ownership between those objects. A high-contrast setting must remain a condition of changing the background color, not of naming the computer.
Preserve a stated activation condition and the product involved. Connecting to the internet does not establish an activation promise for every product or purchase route. A source Windows example is not evidence of FontLab behavior.
A promise not to charge for unused space can say Nu veți plăti pentru spațiul neutilizat. This does not establish that all used space is charged. Similarly, a statement about the best display appearance does not authorize adding a choice of schemes or a new customization command.
Keep the exact scope of destructive actions: Doriți să eliminați toate scripturile din documentul curent? Removing “all” or “current” can change the decision. Use the actual action term; removal, deletion, disabling and disconnecting need not have the same effect.
Agreement, articles and ownership¶
Romanian nouns have masculine, feminine and neuter genders. Grammatical gender is not a simple classification of people versus objects: copac is masculine and carte feminine, although neither denotes a person. Do not assign every new technical borrowing to the neuter by assumption. Check the noun’s established forms and meaning.
Neuter nouns typically combine masculine singular agreement with feminine plural agreement: un fișier nou, două fișiere noi. Compare o semnătură nouă. An isolated “New” string needs the noun and context; nou is not a universal form for every object. Adjectives often follow nouns, but position can depend on meaning and emphasis.
Articles and modifiers agree with their nouns. Distinguish fișier, fișierul, fișiere and fișierele. For possession or association, use the required case: numele fișierului, numele fișierelor, culoarea paginii. Avoid a long chain of genitives when a clearer sentence preserves the relationships.
Possessive forms must match the possessed object and retain the owner. Documentul său and documentele sale do not license replacing every lor with său. Likewise, changing “her document” to documentul can erase ownership. Omit a possessive only when the context still identifies the same object.
Preserve protected product names. Use surrounding grammar or a descriptor, such as setările aplicației FontLab, rather than attaching an invented ending to the name. Translating a feature or moving a company name requires the approved localized name, not a general word-order rule. For sending a file, use Trimiteți fișierul Excel. This is unsuitable when the intended object is the application itself.
Keep required prepositions and pronouns. For a direct-object relative, use fișierul pe care l-ați deschis. For people belonging to a group, use persoanele din grup. A different preposition can change the relationship; Romanian is not immune to meaning changes merely because English uses phrasal verbs.
Choose the demonstrative required by number and gender: același fișier, aceeași pagină, aceiași utilizatori, aceleași fișiere. Do not select a form from spelling alone. When shortening nu îl to nu-l, preserve the negation and object: Nu-l ștergeți. A deletion instruction must not turn into opening or accessing the object.
Use first person when a choice represents the reader’s own declaration, as in Accept and Refuz, if those are the verified labels. A neutral Salvare heading and a Salvați command have different functions. Do not force every label into an imperative or add Doresc să merely to avoid an awkward translation.
Avoid unnecessary gender marking without changing state or number. A completed sign-in can say V-ați conectat. That does not always replace a persistent “You are signed in” status. Do not infer gender from a username, replace one person with several, or erase a relevant relationship. For a real person, respect the person’s stated form of reference.
Keep access requirements intact: Dezvoltatorii au nevoie de acces la serverele din mediile lor de dezvoltare, dar nu au nevoie de acces la serverele din Azure. Not needing access is different from not having it. Inclusive editing does not justify changing the permissions claim.
Counts and complete messages¶
Use numerals for values readers must compare or enter. Spelled-out numbers can suit prose, but one through ten need not be words in every interface. Agreement still matters: un fișier, o pagină, două fișiere, două pagini and doi utilizatori.
Romanian requires different count constructions, including number-dependent de. Do not append one translated noun to every number.
| Count | Romanian example |
|---|---|
| One | 1 fișier |
| Zero or two | 0 fișiere; 2 fișiere |
| Nineteen | 19 fișiere |
| Twenty or twenty-one | 20 de fișiere; 21 de fișiere |
| One hundred | 100 de fișiere |
| One hundred and one | 101 fișiere |
| One hundred and twenty | 120 de fișiere |
CLDR cardinal selection for Romanian has one, few and other. One applies to integer 1 with no visible fraction digits. Few includes zero, values with visible fraction digits and non-one values whose remainder modulo 100 is 1–19. Other covers the remaining values. Thus 101 belongs to few, while 21 belongs to other; 1 and 1.0 can select different variants. Use the actual runtime’s supported locale data and test the full result.
A category does not supply the sentence’s grammar. For one saved file, use A fost salvat un fișier. For two, use Au fost salvate două fișiere. Check zero, one, two, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, one hundred and one, and large values. Test decimals where the quantity supports them; a discrete file count need not accept fractional files.
Preserve placeholders exactly. In printf-style syntax, %c represents a character, not necessarily a letter, and %s a string, not necessarily a filename. If a value is known to be a filename, supply a clear noun: Nu s-a putut deschide fișierul %s. Keep format markers such as %1!d! and %1!-.200s! intact in systems that use them.
Do not assemble a sentence from fragments that assume one noun gender, number or case. Determine what a token such as |0 represents before adding acest. Test long names, punctuation, empty values and reordered substitutions in the complete message.
Spelling, diacritics and borrowed words¶
Use ă, â, î, ș and ț, including the corresponding capitals Ă, Â, Î, Ș and Ț. Romanian ș and ț use comma-below characters U+0219 and U+021B; the capitals are U+0218 and U+021A. Do not silently substitute the older cedilla characters or plain s and t. Check copied, searched and exported text as well as its appearance.
Keep the distinction between â and î. Their spelling is not freely interchangeable because they represent the same vowel. Check uncertain words and compounds in DOOM rather than applying a global character replacement. Preserve exact names, quoted historical text and literal tokens when their original spelling matters.
Check a borrowed word’s spelling and inflection individually. Linkuri and gadgeturi are not formed by inserting a hyphen before every Romanian ending. Under DOOM3, final y pronounced as its usual i or semivowel value does not by itself require a hyphen: hobbyul. Older community examples with blanket hyphenation after y must not override that rule. Other spellings and pronunciations can require a hyphen; verify the actual word.
Distinguish ordinary borrowed nouns from protected names and identifiers. An acronym may take an ending, as in PC-ul, where the context calls for it. That does not authorize changing a product name, filename, variable or format token.
Use sentence case for headings and interface text. Keep the established capitalization of brands and literal identifiers. Days, months and language names normally use lowercase in Romanian prose. Internet and web are not interchangeable concepts; use lowercase internet and web where they are ordinary words, without altering a protected name containing them.
Check compounds and plurals in their current dictionary context. Different plural forms can carry different senses or represent accepted variants. Do not retain a long list of mandatory forms merely because an older summary labels them correct. Likewise, a conjugation table must distinguish indicative from subjunctive forms. For a creation instruction, use Creați un fișier. Check the complete verb phrase rather than copying an isolated ending.
Punctuation and numeric notation¶
Use Romanian quotation marks „text”, with U+201E opening and U+201D closing. Nested quotation can use «text». Do not reuse the closing character from the Bulgarian page. In prose, preserve an exact label: Selectați „Salvați”. Apply the house treatment consistently and verify the actual label.
Keep literal syntax intact. Straight quotes and other delimiters in code belong to the language or format being shown; do not replace them with typographic quotes. An entity such as & can represent visible text, while a token such as &brandName; can supply a product name. Determine its role before translating or changing it. Use și for an ordinary conjunction, but preserve an ampersand in a name or required resource syntax.
Do not put spaces before commas, periods, colons, semicolons, question marks or exclamation marks. This is not a ban on the normal space before an opening quotation mark. Quotation and parenthesis punctuation depends on whether the enclosed text stands alone or belongs to the surrounding sentence. Avoid importing one blanket rule for every construction.
Use a colon to introduce a list when the lead-in calls for one. Treat sentence items as sentences and short fragments consistently. A heading need not acquire a colon merely because a numbered procedure follows it. Captions and callouts take punctuation appropriate to their actual text; neither a universal period ban nor lowercase beginnings for complete sentences is useful.
Keep a hyphen, a dash and a mathematical minus distinct. Use − (U+2212) for a minus where the notation supports it. For prose explanations, a colon or a new sentence often avoids a crowded dash construction. Follow Romanian spelling for compounds and contracted forms. Ellipses can identify an unfinished thought or a verified interface behavior; they are not restricted to split callouts.
For localized numbers, use decimal comma and the locale’s grouping convention: 1.234,5. Romanian CLDR percent formatting includes a nonbreaking space: 15,2 %. Keep scientific or machine-readable notation distinct when a specification requires it. A version identifier such as 4.2 must not become 4,2 through decimal formatting.
Separate values and units with a nonbreaking space: 100 MB, 5,4 kg, 3 cm. Use the correct case in symbols: km, kg, MHz, MB and kB are not freely interchangeable with capitalized or lowercased variants. Distinguish bits from bytes and decimal from binary prefixes. Preserve a source quantity rather than silently relabeling it.
For prescribed unit symbols, use s and min; do not confuse them with prose abbreviations such as sec. Use actual superscripts where supported: m², cm². Distinguish angular 90° from temperature 90 °C. A nonbreaking space is a spacing character, not a degree sign, even if an editor displays a visible formatting marker.
Use nonbreaking spaces to keep short meaningful groups together, not to make an entire long address or name unbreakable. Test narrow layouts. Prefer established abbreviations such as nr., fig. and pag. when needed. Do not invent abbreviations that collide with other meanings or strip their diacritics. Localize surrounding version and copyright wording according to the approved notice while preserving names, identifiers and required text.
Expand unfamiliar acronyms when it helps the reader. DNS means Domain Name System. Keep standardized abbreviations and approved product terminology consistent; an English expansion need not accompany every familiar acronym.
Commands, states and errors¶
Keep a command, ongoing operation, completed result and failed attempt distinct. An English continuous form does not require deleting a named actor.
| Purpose | Romanian example |
|---|---|
| Save command | Salvați |
| Save in progress | Fișierul se salvează. |
| Saved result | Fișierul a fost salvat. |
| Failed save attempt | Fișierul nu a putut fi salvat. |
| Current inability | Fișierul nu poate fi salvat. |
| Wait instruction | Așteptați. |
For a failed sign-in attempt, use Nu am reușit să vă conectăm. Încercați din nou. Preserve a later support instruction only under its stated condition: Dacă problema persistă, contactați echipa de asistență. Do not flatten every past failure into a current inability or infer a permanent fault.
Keep memory distinct from disk space. For memory, use Memorie insuficientă pentru această operație. For storage, use Spațiu insuficient pe disc pentru această operație. These describe different shortages. Name the unavailable object and give only a supported recovery step. Not every error requires a restart.
Keep the actor when it matters. If the source says Word is repaginating, removing Word can make the message ambiguous in a multi-application workflow. Use impersonal or reflexive wording when appropriate, not as an automatic deletion rule.
Prefer a clear failed-attempt construction such as nu a reușit when it fits. That house preference does not make every use of a eșua ungrammatical. Likewise, “complete” can mean finished, entire or fully supplied; it is not always translated with the same verb. Preserve the state the product reports.
A command such as Adăugați un comentariu differs from Adăugați comentariul when the object is not yet identified. “Select all” needs the actual object and grammatical agreement. Cancel and Undo must remain distinguishable even if both use forms of a anula; name the action being undone when needed.
Use apologies and vă rugăm where they serve the reader. Do not add pity, jokes or unjustified reassurance to serious failures. A short status can be a fragment, but it must still identify the correct action and object.
Interface, keyboard and inclusion¶
Match the actual localized labels and the platform’s key notation. Săgeată la dreapta, Săgeată la stânga, Săgeată în sus and Săgeată în jos can identify arrow keys. Distinguish a keypad key when the control requires it: tasta Enter de pe tastatura numerică. Test focus movement, Home, End and arrows in the actual control.
Access keys, displayed key tips and command shortcuts are different mechanisms. Markers such as &, _ or a backtick belong to a particular resource format. Do not remove them merely because a Mozilla-specific guide describes that behavior for its products. Nor must a translated control always keep the English access-key letter. Check assignment, collisions, visibility, scope and keyboard layout.
Do not approve or reject a character solely because it has a descender or a thin stroke. Test the interface’s support for Romanian letters. An old shortcut table is not evidence for current FontLab mappings. Majuscule reduse refers to small capitals, not lowercase; verify the typography command and shortcut separately.
Use Selectați when selection is the action and the input method is irrelevant. Specify clicking, dragging or a key when the method matters. Test keyboard access, visible focus, labels, alternatives and screen-reader output. One verb per sentence or spelling out every operator does not by itself establish accessibility.
Keep examples respectful and relevant. Persoană cu dizabilitate can name a person without reducing them to a condition. Do not replace precise technical or relationship terms automatically because they contain a metaphor or grammatical gender. A blocklist and an allowlist must retain their distinct functions; a role or family relationship must retain its meaning. Review misleading or exclusionary legacy wording when encountered.
Narration and final review¶
Give a video one clear task and a recognizable title. Record a short trial to check pronunciation, pace, clarity and synchronization with the demonstrated actions. Use captions and meaningful visuals. A fixed ten-second introduction, constant motion or a ban on recaps is not a Romanian language rule.
Use established Romanian pronunciations where appropriate and check protected names. Read an acronym as a word or as letters according to actual usage, not a mechanical rule. Speak numbers and operators according to their role. Read URLs and filenames so the listener can recover them; omitting a protocol or losing a hyphen must not change the address.
Review complete strings in context, including every plural form and number-dependent de construction. Preserve program tokens and distinguish them from visible entities. Check spelling, labels, narrow controls, long substitutions, diacritics, keyboard use and text expansion. Keep related terminology consistent without forcing unlike controls into identical wording.
Have a proficient Romanian reviewer resolve uncertain language and product terms. Translation memory and machine suggestions need review. Microsoft and Mozilla examples contribute evidence and alternatives; neither supplier’s product-specific conventions override the approved house context automatically.