Slovak¶
Write natural Slovak that preserves what the reader needs to know and do. Keep the actor, conditions, quantities, permissions and outcome intact when you change the sentence structure. Slovak and Czech need separate language review.
Use this page with the house guide and localization review. The examples illustrate wording; check labels and behavior against the actual product before using them.
Voice and address¶
Use friendly formal address for technical instructions: Otvorte súbor. Keep the register consistent within a workflow. A campaign can use a different agreed voice, but an error or possible-loss warning needs plain, precise language.
Prefer familiar words when the meaning stays the same. Postupujte takto is usually more direct than a long introduction to numbered steps. Do not treat every longer word, descriptor or technical term as unsuitable. Finding information and reading it are different actions; nájsť and prečítať si are not interchangeable just because one sentence sounds smoother.
Choose terms in context. Údaje is appropriate for personal data; specialist uses of dáta need the product’s terminology. A list of email-related words is not a list of synonyms usable in every position. Keep an agreed spelling such as e-mail consistent. Do not replace a description of restoring defaults with resetovať unless the operation really has that meaning.
Use lowercase vy and váš in ordinary interface and help prose. Personally addressed correspondence can follow its own convention. Omit an explicit personal pronoun when the verb already makes the addressee clear.
In Slovak formal address, verbal forms are plural even when addressing one person: Uložili ste súbor? Do not import Czech singular past-participle agreement into this construction. An adjective or passive participle referring to the person can still require singular gender agreement. Rephrase when that information is unknown: Odhlásenie bolo dokončené. preserves completion without assigning personal gender. See the language institute’s discussions of verbal forms and predicative agreement.
Preserve the task¶
Natural translation can change the structure, but not the facts. Check these common failure points:
- A failed key operation does not prove that the key is invalid. Tento kľúč sa nepodarilo použiť. Skontrolujte ho a skúste to znova. reports the failure without inventing its cause.
- Canceling does not itself save the work. For a verified button labeled Zrušiť, an instruction can be Vyberte Zrušiť, dokončite úpravy a uložte súbor. Keep the actions in their required order.
- Watching a gesture demonstration is not tracing it. If both are required, say Pozrite si ukážku a zopakujte zobrazené gestá. Specify the actual input method where needed.
- A restart message must identify what restarts, why and what resumes afterward. Do not change an automatic restart into an unexplained manual instruction.
- Preserve everyone affected by a possible loss of unsaved work. Do not remove other users or turn “could lose” into either certainty or reassurance.
- Keep the automatic move, destination and prerequisite when a document moves only after missing or invalid properties are corrected.
A permission choice must describe authorization. Povoliť aplikácii prístup k polohe zariadenia identifies access being granted. An invitation to enjoy personalized content does not convey the same decision. Keep whose location, name, picture or account information is involved and which data categories are included.
Retain limits exactly. “Up to 100 MB” includes the boundary; “less than 100 MB” excludes it. Do not replace a precise limit with a playful request for something smaller. A source’s uncertainty, exception or condition remains part of the message even when parentheses are removed.
Localize a cultural reference only when it fits the intended audience and preserves the point. Avoid inserting a song, idiom or joke merely to make an error sound conversational. A control over who sees content does not necessarily provide unrestricted control over individual files.
Grammar and ownership¶
Inflect nouns, adjectives and pronouns for the construction in which they appear. The table uses an inanimate masculine noun; people and other noun classes can require different endings.
| Construction | Slovak example |
|---|---|
| A new file | nový súbor |
| Without a new file | bez nového súboru |
| Toward a new file | k novému súboru |
| In a new file | v novom súbore |
| With a new file | s novým súborom |
| New files | nové súbory |
| In new files | v nových súboroch |
Do not apply one masculine plural ending everywhere. Pripojení používatelia refers to people; pripojené zariadenia refers to devices. The whole noun phrase and verb must agree. A singular subject such as osoba takes a singular verb: Osoba s príslušnými oprávneniami môže nastavovať heslá iných používateľov.
Slovak has no articles corresponding directly to English a and the. Preserve whether a message concerns one particular item, any item or all items through the whole sentence. Do not mechanically insert a numeral or demonstrative for each English article.
Use reflexive svoj when the owner is the grammatical subject: Uložte svoj súbor. Use a different possessive when the subject changes: Server odmietol vaše používateľské meno. Omitting a possessive is useful only when ownership remains clear. “A user’s password” must not become “my password” unless the control really refers to the current person.
Choose prepositions for the relationship: licencia pre používateľa names the recipient, while nástroj na kreslenie names a purpose. For a procedure, Ak chcete vytvoriť šablónu, postupujte takto: can make the purpose explicit. Do not ban na, or replace every ak clause with a noun phrase. “If you attempt to install” and “during installation” need not describe the same condition.
English word order can obscure which term modifies which. Služby vzdialenej inštalácie makes the installation remote. Check such relationships before shortening a compound phrase. Sentence-initial conjunctions, passive constructions and conditional clauses are tools, not a list of prohibited forms. Use them when their relationship is clear.
Counts¶
For simple count displays, use 1 súbor, 2 súbory, 3 súbory, 4 súbory, 5 súborov, 0 súborov and 21 súborov. Do not choose a form from the last digit alone. Test complete sentences as well as labels: the surrounding case and agreement still matter.
Unicode CLDR’s Slovak cardinal rules distinguish integer one, integers two through four, values with visible fractional digits, and other values. A decimal example is 1,5 dňa. Verify how the actual formatter handles visible decimals, including values such as 1,0; a plural category does not supply a finished grammatical sentence.
People and accessibility¶
Do not infer gender from a name, username or placeholder. Use a person’s stated form of reference and preserve their name. A slash ending such as vytvoril/-a does not solve every identity or agreement problem. Prefer a complete neutral construction when it retains the meaning; use reviewed variants when necessary and supported by the available information.
Do not change one person into several merely to avoid a gendered verb. Preserve the actor where attribution matters, including event histories and permission records. A separate actor field beside a neutral event description can help, provided the relationship remains accessible and unambiguous.
Use respectful descriptions of people and disabilities. Do not substitute “normal” or “healthy” for “without a disability,” or confuse blindness with low vision. Review inherited text when it is in scope; its age does not make an exclusionary formulation acceptable.
Make instructions usable across supported input methods. Vyberte is useful when the action is selection, but clicking, dragging and tracing are not always equivalent to selection. Keep the necessary method explicit. Do not rely only on a color, location or sound to identify an action. Test the actual assistive output rather than banning every mathematical symbol or forcing one verb per sentence. See accessible content.
Names, abbreviations and placeholders¶
Use current product terminology and recognizable names. Slovak can inflect many borrowed names, but a supplier’s list of permitted forms does not govern every product. A descriptor can provide the grammatical frame: v aplikácii FontLab, s aplikáciou FontLab. Do not invent a product adjective or attach an ending to an unknown substituted name.
For a contract that supplies an application name, Otvoriť v aplikácii {app} leaves the value intact. Test multiword names, version labels and any supported missing-value case. Keep placeholder identifiers, format syntax, tags and escapes exact. A character placeholder can contain punctuation; it is not necessarily a letter. Grammar repairs must not change the formatter’s contract.
Preserve literal filenames, paths, URLs, extension case and version strings. A version such as 4.2 is not a decimal quantity to change to 4,2. Keep meaningful characters when quoting or reading a value, including the s in an https URL and a required trailing slash.
Explain unfamiliar acronyms when useful and verify their expansion. DNS expands to Domain Name System, as named in RFC 1034. A name server is one component of that system. Check established Slovak acronyms and technical terms instead of inventing them or reversing every descriptor and acronym to sound modern.
Distinguish abbreviations from unit symbols. Napr., t. j. and č. contain abbreviation periods; technical time symbols are s, min and h. In values, use 30 s, 5 min and 2 h. Ordinary word abbreviations such as min. and hod. are not the same notation as unit symbols. See NIST’s unit table.
Interface wording and message states¶
Choose the grammatical form for the surface. Menu commands and action buttons normally use an infinitive, instructions address the reader, and a descriptive tooltip can state what a control does. An activity title can use an action noun. These conventions do not justify replacing a correct established label or forcing every tooltip into the same tense.
| Purpose | Slovak example |
|---|---|
| Command label | Uložiť súbor |
| Instruction | Uložte súbor. |
| Control description | Uloží súbor. |
| Activity title | Ukladanie súboru |
| In progress | Súbor sa ukladá. |
| Completed | Súbor bol uložený. |
| Attempt failed | Súbor sa nepodarilo uložiť. |
| Currently unavailable | Súbor sa nedá uložiť. |
An infinitive command and a progress message are not interchangeable. Neither is a failed attempt the same as current unavailability. A reflexive progress sentence is often concise, but Prebieha inštalácia. is not ungrammatical or forbidden. Keep the actor when the message says who canceled an operation; passive voice is acceptable when it expresses the needed focus accurately.
State a known problem and a supported next step. Identify the required field instead of saying only that “this” cannot be blank. Distinguish Nedostatok pamäte. from insufficient disk space. Do not add “test” to a bitmap name unless the bitmap is actually a test image. Do not turn every error into one that blocks the whole application or needs a restart.
Use sentence case for labels and titles. Ordinary words for help, clipboard or settings do not require capitals in every context; preserve a capitalized name when it is an exact interface label. Vlastnosti siete is a valid title and does not need to become a dash construction. Short labels usually omit final punctuation; full explanatory tooltip sentences can take periods. Retain an ellipsis when it belongs to the actual control label.
When referring to an interface item, match its displayed wording and use the house emphasis convention. Add a descriptor when it helps identify the control. Do not inflect the quoted label or silently change it to a preferred synonym.
Typography and notation¶
Preserve Slovak accents in lowercase and capitals, including ä, ô, ľ, ĺ, ŕ and Ä, Ô, Ľ, Ĺ, Ŕ. Do not remove them in all-capitals text. Check their rendering in the actual typeface and at small sizes.
Use Slovak double quotation marks „{filename}“, with U+201E at the start and U+201C at the end. Nested quotations can use ‚…‘. Literal code keeps its required quotation syntax. Punctuation placement depends on whether the quotation is a complete sentence or a phrase. Names usually need no quotation marks when other emphasis identifies them, but quotation marks can clarify the boundary of a long title.
Use a colon for an introduction or complete label. Keep punctuation within a list consistent with its sentence structure. Parentheses and sentence fragments have legitimate uses; labels need not be rewritten as full sentences. Do not erase a condition just to remove parentheses.
Use a spaced dash when a dash is needed, including a range such as 2024 – 2026. It is different from a hyphen and from mathematical minus: −18 °C uses U+2212 attached to the number. Numeric word compounds take a hyphen, as in 50-percentná zľava. See the Slovak spelling rules, punctuation sections.
Use a decimal comma and readable grouping in prose: 10 250,75. Keep a value with its symbol using a nonbreaking space: 12,5 mm, 50 % and 1250 €. In Slovak, the space before % remains when it represents an adjective: 50 % zľava. The language institute’s percent-sign guidance distinguishes this notation from the hyphenated word form. Do not import the Czech adjectival spacing rule.
Use nonbreaking spaces where they prevent an unsuitable line break, including short prepositions when appropriate. Test wrapping on narrow screens rather than banning these spaces in online documentation. Avoid making an entire long phrase unbreakable. Preserve machine-readable punctuation and spacing in code or data.
Keyboard, speech and review¶
Verify shortcuts in the current product on supported Slovak keyboard layouts. Access keys, ribbon key tips and command shortcuts are different mechanisms; their resource syntax is platform-specific. Do not assign duplicate keys as a blanket fallback or assume every control must have one. Preserve actual key labels and distinguish the numeric keypad when the action requires it.
Test arrow-key movement, focus groups and escape routes in the actual interface. A supplier’s control description does not establish how every application behaves. Inherited shortcut tables are not evidence that an assignment still works, or that “Save as” can lose the verb in translation.
For speech, use natural standard Slovak and verify unfamiliar names and acronyms individually. Do not impose one pronunciation for every borrowed letter or repeat a corrupted phonetic transcription. Read literal addresses and technical characters clearly enough to recover the intended value.
Keep narration, captions and demonstrated actions aligned. Preserve the distinction between the narrator’s activity and the reader’s instruction. Match personal agreement to the speaker where relevant, without guessing from the voice. Fit captions to the delivery specification and test readability; a fixed forty-character limit is not a universal language rule.
Review the result with a proficient Slovak reviewer. Check actual substitutions, plural values, accents, punctuation, narrow layouts, keyboard access and assistive output. Verify product behavior separately from this guide’s illustrative language examples.
Sources¶
Adapted from Microsoft’s Slovak localization guidance and Mozilla’s Slovak community guide, with source notices and adaptation terms recorded in credits. The adaptation consolidates their advice, corrects meaning changes and unsupported absolutes, and applies house context. Linked primary sources support selected linguistic and notation checks. See credits for shared attribution.