Zulu (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 clear, natural isiZulu for the intended reader. Keep address, register and technical terminology consistent. Prefer direct wording when it helps the task; do not ban passive voice or choose every term by length. Adapt an idiom's intended meaning rather than its English words. A conversational rewrite must preserve conditions, uncertainty and product capabilities.
Treat supplier term preferences as contextual. Sesha, ukusesha and cinga are not evidence that the shortest form is always right. Choose the product's approved search term and its grammatical form. Likewise, Chofoza and qhafaza require a consistent terminology choice and the right gesture. Follow interface actions; clicking, selecting and pressing are not automatic substitutes.
Shorten only where the surrounding interface supplies the omitted meaning. The supplier's replacement of Qhafaza nanka amabhathini with Yenza nakhu removes the explicit click action and buttons. It is not a safe general model for sentence fragments. Questions such as Ungathanda ukuqhubeka? and readiness statements such as Konke sekulungele ukuqalisa need their own sentence structure.
Commands, states and messages¶
Keep actions distinct from their results. Izibuyekezo zifakiwe reports installed updates. A restart warning must retain possible loss, unsaved work and every affected user. Correcting invalid properties must precede a dependent move. Khansela does not establish that work has been saved.
Preserve technical properties. “Case-sensitive” means that uppercase and lowercase are distinguished, not that letters are emotionally sensitive. A bootable drive must retain the ability to start the system; a term suggesting renewal does not preserve that property. Keep a product key identifiable as the required code.
Choose error wording for the actual actor and time. Ayikwazanga ukuvula ifayela, Ayiphumelelanga ukuvula ifayela and Inthanethi ayitholakali are supplied patterns for different failures or states. They are not universal prefixes. A memory error must not become a disk-space error: memory and available storage are different resources. Name the cause and recovery action only when known, without blaming the reader.
Keep placeholders and resource escapes intact, then check the complete substituted message. A noun-class concord cannot be chosen safely from an unknown value. Retain literal version syntax, as in Inguqulo 8.1. Product names and copyright facts remain accurate even when their surrounding prose is localized.
Grammar, names and word formation¶
Noun classes control agreement; they are not a scheme for assigning biological sex to interface objects. Preserve the intended person, owner, count and relationship. Do not assume that all borrowed words take one class or that every singular pluralizes by moving to the next numbered class.
| Review point | Example |
|---|---|
| Singular and plural | umuntu, abantu; umuthi, imithi; iqanda, amaqanda |
| Borrowed noun and plural | ikhompyutha, amakhompyutha |
| Adjective agreement | umfana omncane |
| Location | kule wizadi, kudokhumenti: preserve the intended spatial relationship |
| Demonstrative reference | laba, labo, labaya: distance and reference matter |
Check agreement throughout the noun phrase and sentence. Possessives such as wami depend on the noun and owner; do not append English possessive 's to a name. Locative wording must preserve distinctions such as in, to and from. English rules about ending a sentence with a preposition do not determine isiZulu syntax.
Use pronoun stems and concords in their full context. -nke, -dwa and -bili do not mean the same thing. Bakhuluma bobabili preserves a reference to two speakers; replacing its quantity with “all” may change the message. Inclusive wording must not erase number or an actual relationship.
Keep proper-name capitals inside prefixed forms where required, as in ngoMsombuluko, eShayina and i-Windows. Use sentence case for headings and controls. An isiZulu prefix is not an English article, and it does not authorize changing a protected product name. A descriptive noun can make a name easier to use grammatically.
Follow established compound spelling, as in iphephandaba, rather than mechanically joining every adjacent word. Name-forming elements such as No-, Ma- and So- are not a general list of pronouns. Contractions are register choices: the supplied musa uku and mus'uku alternatives are not a requirement to contract every instruction. Review constructions with ukuba, ukuthi and ukuze for their intended relation and verb form. A list of conjunctions alone does not determine the mood of every following verb.
Abbreviations, notation and sorting¶
Use recognized abbreviations when they suit the reader and space. Supplied forms include Dkt., Mfu., Slz., Nkz., Nkk., Mnu., Nks., isb., njl. and njll. Sources contain variants; settle the product's spelling and punctuation rather than alternating arbitrarily. Name prefixes can remain attached to titles, as in uDkt. Do not invent an abbreviation merely to shorten a label.
Keep established acronyms and explain unfamiliar ones when useful. DNS means Domain Name System. Preserve TCP/IP when that is the source technology; i-TCP drops part of its identifier. Verify expansions and localized forms instead of inventing them. Avoid a redundant word after an expanded acronym, but retain a descriptor that makes the referent clear.
Use the locale formatter for numbers, dates, currency and percentages. CLDR 48 Zulu inherits the root decimal point and grouping comma: 1,234.5 illustrates those separators. Check the runtime actually used by the product rather than treating this versioned data as proof of every formatter's output. Keep values and identifier syntax unchanged. Unit symbols retain their defined spelling and case.
Use normal question marks and sentence punctuation. Follow punctuation for UI references, quotations, labels and ellipses. Do not double quotation marks in ordinary prose merely because a resource format may need escaping. Distinguish a hyphen in a word, a range dash and a minus: 2–7 and −9 °C have different functions. Keep values with their units where practical.
Dictionary ordering by a stem is not a universal interface sorting rule. The supplier's intini, izintini and stem ntini illustrate a lexicographic choice. Do not strip prefixes from arbitrary names or labels before sorting. Use the product's locale-aware collation and test the displayed list; an ASCII character table is not a language collation specification.
South African phone numbers¶
Keep the national trunk prefix distinct from the country code. South African geographic numbers have ten digits in domestic form, including the leading 0; this is not a ten-digit area code. In international form, +27 replaces that initial zero. A masked illustration is 0AA BBB CCCC becoming +27 AA BBB CCCC. Other number classes, short codes and service numbers require their applicable numbering rules. Preserve the actual digits and verify the destination; a formatting example is not a callable number.
Accessible interfaces and spoken review¶
Follow accessible content. Check actual control names, keyboard access and alternative input and output. Localization must not promise unavailable hardware or accessibility behavior. Review complete messages with real values for clipping, agreement and useful recovery wording.
Identify keys by their actual keycaps and explain them in isiZulu where helpful. Test access-key markers and escapes, collisions, key tips and command shortcuts in the target application. Do not import English bindings or assume identical arrow-key behavior in every control. Specify the numeric keypad when it matters. Resource syntax and protected names must survive translation unchanged.
Use natural isiZulu pronunciation, with a proficient speaker checking retained names, acronyms, URLs and symbols. The supplier's inconsistent IPA examples are unsuitable for direct recording. Read the draft aloud against the visuals and the viewer's task. An introduction, recap or pause should earn its time; neither a fixed ten-second opening nor a ban on repetition is a language rule. Apply the shared localization review and obtain proficient isiZulu review of the finished translation.