Xhosa (South Africa) style guide¶
Apply these local conventions alongside the house voice and localization review. Source acknowledgments and selected references are in credits.
Voice and exact meaning¶
Write natural isiXhosa for the intended reader, using consistent address and approved technical terms. Prefer a direct sentence when it makes the action clearer. Passive voice, longer words and familiar loanwords are not faults by themselves. Adapt idioms to their meaning and register; do not invent a new capability while making a message friendlier.
A shorter term must preserve the operation. The supplier's replacement table is not a synonym list: do not automatically replace Qalisa or Yenza with Baleka, Bona with Fumana, or Ngako oko with Kodwa. Check whether the source means starting, doing, running, seeing, finding, a consequence or a contrast. Likewise, “help,” “enable” and “succeed” do not promise the same outcome. Follow interface actions for gestures.
Use complete words in their sentence context. The stem -enza appears in Yenza umsebenzi wam; a stem alone is not a finished command. Keep conjunctions when they express a necessary relationship. Forms such as kunye, ne, na and no require the appropriate construction, not a blanket instruction to join or separate every conjunction.
Commands, states and messages¶
Use action wording for commands and state wording for results. Ungathanda ukuqhubeka? asks about continuing; Konke kulungele ukuqalisa reports readiness. Zifakiwe izihlaziyi is a supplied completion example. Do not turn an installed state into installation in progress.
Preserve every consequential part of a warning: possible loss, unsaved work, the affected users and the condition that triggers it. If invalid properties must be corrected before moving an item, retain that order. A USB drive described as bootable must retain that property. A product key is an identifier; do not accidentally describe a physical button. Rhoxisa does not imply that cancelling saves work.
A case-sensitive password distinguishes uppercase from lowercase. It does not forbid uppercase letters. Translate that distinction explicitly and check it against the actual password behavior. Short labels and sentence fragments may omit information supplied by the interface, but a search result or contact-list label must not become an instruction to search.
Error wording must identify the right actor, time and cause. Awunako ukucima addresses the reader's inability to delete; it is not a universal template for every system failure. Akuphumelelanga ukucima and Imemori ayanelanga are supplied failure and memory patterns, not interchangeable responses. Keep memory distinct from storage space. State a recovery step only when the product supports it.
Noun classes, names and agreement¶
Noun classes govern agreement; biological sex does not assign an icon to a “feminine” class or a button to a “masculine” one. Check the complete noun phrase and its verb, modifier and pronoun. Prefix shape alone does not settle every class or plural.
| Distinction | Example or review point |
|---|---|
| Singular and plural | umntu, abantu; umntwana, abantwana |
| Adjective agreement | Igama elide: keep the modifier's agreement with the noun |
| Possession | -am, -akho need the correct concord and an identifiable owner |
| Pronoun reference | yena, wena, into cannot be exchanged merely to shorten a sentence |
Pluralize the intended referent and repair its agreement throughout the message. Do not assume that every noun follows the next numbered class, or that every word must acquire a plural prefix. Counts, mass nouns and substituted names need whole-message review.
Keep product names and identifiers recognizable. A surrounding i- or I- belongs to the grammatical construction; it does not authorize changing the protected name's spelling. Use a descriptor if it avoids an awkward or ambiguous construction. Keep sentence case in headings and labels, with the necessary capitals inside names. Do not copy English title case or an English article rule into isiXhosa. Removing a possessive must not erase an important owner.
Spelling, abbreviations and acronyms¶
Use a current dictionary and the agreed terminology for spelling and word division. Retain meaningful reduplication and its spelling, as in ezizintlobo-ntlobo. Compounds and borrowed terms need lexical and grammatical review rather than an automatic space or hyphen rule.
Abbreviations exist in isiXhosa. The supplied materials include umz., njl., okt., Njing., Gqir., Nksk., Nksz. and Mnu., with some different spellings and punctuation between sources. Choose the appropriate recognized form for the product and register; do not treat every variant as freely interchangeable or invent a truncation to fit a control. Expand an unfamiliar form when space and reader needs allow.
Keep established technical acronyms and explain unfamiliar ones when useful. DNS expands to Domain Name System; verify the actual technical expansion before translating it. A product's approved localized acronym may differ from an English one. Avoid redundant expansions, but retain a descriptor when it makes the referent clear. Unit symbols such as g, kg and cm retain their defined spelling; gm is not the symbol for gram.
Numbers, punctuation and protected syntax¶
Use the product's locale formatter for numbers, currency, dates and percentages, then inspect its output. The supplier and Mozilla examples disagree about grouping and decimal separators, and the Mozilla guide is internally inconsistent. Do not combine their examples into one rule. In CLDR 48, Xhosa uses a nonbreaking grouping space and inherits a decimal point: 1 234.5 illustrates those separators. This versioned data check does not establish the behavior of every runtime. Keep numeric values and identifier syntax unchanged; a version such as 4.2 is not a decimal quantity to reformat.
Use the ordinary question mark ? (U+003F). The supplier's claim that it should be mirrored is unsupported by its own examples. Use full stops for complete sentences and follow punctuation for labels and UI references. Do not add quotation marks around every control or double them unless a resource format specifically requires escaping. Ellipses and dashes are available punctuation; their use depends on meaning and house style, not a claim that they do not exist in the language.
Keep a typographic minus distinct from a range dash: −9 °C is a negative temperature; 2–7 is a range. A hyphenated sequence with unclear endpoints needs source clarification. Use nonbreaking spacing where a value and unit must stay together. Percent spacing follows the chosen formatter; 50% is a source example, not permission to override it.
Preserve placeholders exactly, including their type and formatting instructions. The supplied %d, %ld, %u, %lu, %c, %s, %1!d!, %2!d! and %1!-.200s! belong to particular formatting systems. Do not assume that every engine accepts them. Review complete substituted messages for agreement, order and clipping; avoid attaching a fixed concord to a value whose noun class is unknown.
Accessible interfaces and final review¶
Follow accessible content, checking actual control names and alternative input and output. Describe a capability only when it exists in the product. Maps, country names and availability claims need appropriate current evidence; a generic localization checklist does not require removing every geographical reference.
Use key names that identify the actual keyboard, retaining printed keycaps where necessary and explaining them in isiXhosa when helpful. Distinguish access keys, key tips and command shortcuts. In formats using & and &&, verify the resource parser's marker and escape rules; these are not ordinary punctuation replacements. Test collisions and actual bindings. Imported English shortcut tables, Arabic letter exclusions and blanket arrow-key behavior are not isiXhosa requirements. Specify the numeric keypad when that distinction affects the action.
For spoken material, use natural isiXhosa pronunciation and appropriate inflection of borrowed terms. Check names, acronyms, URLs and symbols with a proficient speaker; the supplier's English-oriented pronunciation list is not a reliable script. Read the full interface and spoken draft with context, substituted values and visuals. The shared review covers terminology, completeness, wrapping and consistency; a proficient isiXhosa reviewer must assess the finished translation.