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Language Expansion 2026 — +6 Locales (fi, sv, hu, is, eu, fa)

WorldScript Studio went from 11 → 17 shipped locales. This phase adds Finnish (fi), Swedish (sv), Hungarian (hu), Icelandic (is), Basque (eu) and Persian/Farsi (fa, RTL). All six ship as Beta (isBeta: true) and reuse the proven Beta-stub → bulk-translate → human-QA pipeline that delivered ja/zh/pt/el (P1-5).

Why these six

  • Nordic reach: Swedish + Finnish + Icelandic cover the Nordic writing market.
  • Uralic: Hungarian and Finnish exercise the agglutinative/long-compound layout edge cases.
  • Basque (eu): a non-Indo-European European language; validates short-string discipline.
  • Persian (fa): the third RTL locale (after ar/he), in Arabic script — exercises the RTL pipeline end-to-end with a fresh language.

What shipped vs. what's machine-pending

Hand-translated to production quality (all 6 langs):

  • sidebar.json (nav chrome) and dashboard.json — ~100 % translated (EN-identical < 3 %).
  • portal.json (welcome screen) — 100 % of localizable strings, including the 17 language-name exonyms (portal.language.names.<code>) shown in the LanguageSelector subtitle/search. The lone EN-identical key is portal.features.ai.title = "AI Co-Pilot" (brand term, verbatim by glossary).
  • The high-traffic common.* action verbs (Save/Cancel/Delete/Close/Undo/… — the ~31 ubiquitous keys).
  • Cold-start values (services/i18nBootstrap.ts) — native title/logline/chapter-1, no English flash.
  • Glossary blocks (locales/translation-glossary.json).

Language picker (components/ui/LanguageSelector.tsx): the visible exonym label is resolved at render time via t('portal.language.names.<code>') (no hardcoded UI strings); the endonym (nativeName — Suomi, Svenska, …) stays hardcoded by design so a speaker always finds their own language regardless of the active UI locale. portal.language.names.* is hand-translated for the 5 core + 6 new languages and English-fallback for the other Beta locales (filled by the bulk translator).

Machine-translated — bulk run completed 2026-06-17 (Beta; human native review pending):

  • All remaining modules (common, writer, manuscript, settings, copilot, export, …) were completed via scripts/bulk-translate-locales.mjs — glossary-anchored (v2.0, ~44 anchor terms/locale) and placeholder-masked. Post-run coverage (translated; EN-identical residual is mostly brand/format verbatim terms plus the English-fallback help.json for the 6 new langs):

    fi sv hu is eu fa ja zh pt el
    91 % 90 % 91 % 92 % 92 % 93 % 99 % 100 % 98 % 97 %

  • help.json stays English fallback for the new Beta langs and is excluded from --all (ALL_SKIP in the bulk script). Its long-form rich HTML cannot be safely machine-translated by the free endpoint — the tag-dense markup gets mangled (dropped/duplicated tags → unbalanced HTML) even with sentinel masking. Translating it is a human-review task; valid English help is shipped in the meantime. (ja/zh/pt/el help.json were translated in the earlier P1-5 run and are unchanged.)

  • Quality bar is Beta / machine translation; human native review is the tracked follow-up (checklist in TRANSLATION-GUIDE.md §6). Measure coverage any time with node scripts/check-i18n-keys.mjs --quality.

Two bugs fixed during this run: (1) glossaryTranslate did partial whole-word substitution and returned early, leaving multi-word strings partially English (e.g. "Exportálás your project…") — now exact-match only; ~1,300 mangled strings were reset + re-translated. (2) The --all mode translated help.json and mangled its HTML — now excluded from --all and reset to clean English fallback. Both fixes are in scripts/bulk-translate-locales.mjs.

Running the bulk translator (glossary-first, placeholder-masked, resumable)

node scripts/bulk-translate-locales.mjs --lang=fi,sv,hu,is,eu,fa --all --delay=600
pnpm run i18n:bundle

Script features (scripts/bulk-translate-locales.mjs):

  • Glossary-first — locales/translation-glossary.json (lang-first glossary[lang][term]) takes priority over machine translation.
  • Placeholder masking — {{token}} is masked to a sentinel (⟦0⟧) before MT and restored after, so the engine can't translate or drop interpolation tokens.
  • Checkpointing — .translation-progress-<lang>-<file>.json; re-runs resume.
  • --dry-run — reports per-file key counts + glossary hits with no network calls and no writes.

Estimate progress with the quality scanner:

node scripts/check-i18n-keys.mjs --quality   # lists likely-untranslated (EN-identical) strings per locale

The English-placeholder % trends toward 0 as bulk + human QA complete the non-priority modules.

RTL (fa) notes

  • Direction is automatic: fa is in RTL_LOCALES (contexts/I18nContext.tsx), and App.tsx sets document.documentElement.dir = 'rtl' from it. No per-language CSS needed.
  • Fonts: the [dir="rtl"] font swap in index.css already points at Noto Sans/Naskh Arabic (imported in index.tsx), which cover Persian glyphs (پ چ ژ گ ک ی). No new font import.
  • BiDi edge cases: Canvas/SVG boards (Plot/Scene board) opt out of mirroring via .rtl-keep-ltr so geometry math stays LTR; tables and logical Tailwind utilities (ms-/me-/ps-/pe-) flip automatically. A full BiDi QA pass over fa is tracked with the ar/he v2.0 work.

Layout watch-list (long-compound languages)

fi / hu / is produce longer compounds than English (e.g. Johdonmukaisuustarkistus, Konzisztencia-ellenőrző, Samkvæmnisprófun for "Consistency Checker"). Spot-check the sidebar and dashboard cards for overflow; prefer the shorter glossary form where space is tight.

Glossary

See I18N-GLOSSARY.md. The glossary stays lang-first and its keys match the English source strings verbatim (space-form, e.g. "Plot Board").