localization: how to add a locale, and it is built now

the doc said "DESIGN, NOT BUILT — a working 5% skeleton". six locales ship,
three catalogues, parity in both directions and a test that catches a dead
one. it has said the wrong thing since the day the work landed.

and there was no procedure for the thing anybody would actually come here
to do. seven files: three catalogues, three registrations, and the picker.
written out because the failure it is written from was somebody doing four
of them — es-ES, de-DE and fr-FR once shipped translated, in perfect key
parity, listed in the picker, and completely dead, because all three
registration files still imported only en-GB and pt-PT.

nothing caught that at the time. the section names what catches it now, so
whoever adds the seventh language knows `bun test` settles it rather than
having to trust that it does.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Officer-Session: 656f5c85-e49a-4f1f-b9f3-042a04b4d043
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2026-08-25 03:45:43 +00:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
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# Localization
**Status: DESIGN, NOT BUILT — with a working 5% skeleton already in the tree.**
**Status: BUILT and shipping six locales** — en-GB, pt-PT, es-ES, de-DE, fr-FR, sv-SE. The mechanism
is done; what remains is coverage, which is the count-taking below.
**To add a seventh language, read "Adding a locale" at the bottom and nothing else.** It is seven
files and the order does not matter, but missing one is silent — see the failure it is written from.
This is an execution plan. It is written to be handed to an agent who has not had the conversation
that produced it, so it states the decisions and the reasons for them, not just the steps.
@@ -412,3 +416,55 @@ else will ever notice.
the UI. It is a different feature that happens to sit in the same object — do not conflate them.
5. **Does a member see the owner's locale anywhere?** Any server-rendered or cached string shared
between accounts needs a locale decision. D1 mostly removes this by removing server prose.
---
## Adding a locale
Seven files. Six are mechanical; the seventh is the one that gets missed.
**Three catalogues, one per workspace.** Copy `en-GB.json` beside itself and translate the values,
keeping every key:
```
src/apps/officer-web/locales/<code>.json app.* the shell, screens, settings
src/workspaces/officerdev/src/locales/<code>.json panel.* the windowed apps
src/workspaces/components/locales/<code>.json ui.* shared components
```
**Three registrations, one per catalogue.** Each is an `import` plus a line in a map:
```
src/apps/officer-web/lib/catalogues.ts
src/workspaces/officerdev/src/locales/index.ts
src/workspaces/components/locales/index.ts
```
**And the picker**, which is the one that gets missed the other way round:
```
src/apps/officer-web/lib/locales.ts SHIPPED_LOCALES
```
### Why this is spelled out rather than left to reading the code
es-ES, de-DE and fr-FR once shipped translated, in perfect key parity, listed in the picker — and
completely dead. All three registration files still imported only en-GB and pt-PT, so the merge
produced three empty catalogues and the UI rendered raw keys in three of five languages.
Nothing caught it. The parity tests compare the JSON files against each other and every file was
correct; a locale that is never imported is invisible to them by construction. The picker was right.
Four edits in four files with no single place that knew all four had happened.
### What checks you now
Run `bun test` and it is settled. Two things stand where nothing stood:
- `src/apps/officer-web/lib/catalogues.test.ts` asserts every locale in `SHIPPED_LOCALES` resolves to
a populated catalogue in all three namespaces, and matches en-GB's size. A locale in the picker but
not imported fails here. So does one imported but empty.
- The three `parity.test.ts` files read their own directory rather than listing locales by hand, so a
new `<code>.json` is checked the moment it exists — for missing keys AND extra ones, because
`findMissingKeys` alone reports half of a rename.
Then `bunx tsgo` and `bunx prettier --write` on what you touched, as everywhere else.