Interface language (i18n)

Navi's web client speaks en / uk / ru. The rules themselves live in the platform handbook (handbook.gnexus → 10-platform/i18n); this file only records how navi follows them and what is still untranslated.

Where the language comes from

locale_effective from GET /auth/me — the choice made in Settings (navi_users.locale_override) → the gnexus-auth account locale (navi_users.locale, a straight mirror kept by the user.profile_updated webhook) → en.

The picker is the first block of Settings → Account (webclient/src/components/settings/AccountPanel.vue) and offers Auto / English / Українська / Русский — each language named in its own language. A choice is written with PATCH /auth/me, so it follows the account to other devices and survives logout.

With NAVI_AUTH_ENABLED=false there is no account to follow: the picker drops Auto, the choice is kept in localStorage under navi.locale, and the same key is used when the visitor is not signed in.

The module

webclient/src/i18n/ — vue-i18n is deliberately not pulled in:

• t() interpolates {param} and falls back to the English string when the chosen language has no slug yet (or to the slug itself when nobody has it).
• Plurals are dictionaries ({ one, few, many, other }) driven only by params.n; ru/uk use one/few/many, en uses one/other.
• A slug is <area>.<name> and an area is a screen or a component group — settings.*, sidebar.*, messages.*, chat.*, artifacts.*, ui.*, profile.*, app.*. Slugs are shared with the other gnexus services where they mean the same thing.
• Four areas are vocabulary rather than screens and are filled in as the screens that need them are translated: common.* (save / cancel / delete / revoke…), col.* (table headers), confirm.* (dialog titles and texts) and toast.* (titles of the notifications that pop up after an action).
• SUPPORTED_LOCALES is the single list: adding a language means adding messages/<code>.js there, plus navi/locales.py on the backend (and the same slug in navi_users.locale_override constraints on the client side).
• Lists of options or nav items must be computed, not module-level constants, or their labels freeze in the language that was active at import.

The backend side is navi/locales.py (normalize_locale, effective_locale), mirroring the frontend's normalisation: en-US/en_US → en, anything not shipped → None.

Translation status

The framework and the language block shipped first; from there the interface is translated area by area, biggest first, one commit per area. An area not yet done is hard-coded English and looks exactly as it did before — the two kinds of screen sit side by side without either noticing.

A parenthetical counts the words outside the area that the area's screens also render — a shared word is written once in the vocabulary area and read from there, so the same slug can appear in two parentheticals.

A slug can reach t() in three shapes — a plain literal, one arm of a ternary (t(server.has_key ? 'settings.mcpKeyPlaceholder' : …)) and a template literal — so counting occurrences means walking the whole argument list of every t( call rather than its first quoted string. The remaining strings are counted in templates (text nodes, placeholder, title, aria-label, label, alt) plus keyed strings in <script setup>.

One screen is shared on purpose rather than duplicated:

• The message list's ContentCard shows the same published-file widget as the artifacts drawer, so it reads artifacts.openPreview, artifacts.showPreview, artifacts.showSource, artifacts.copyFileLink, artifacts.loadingSource and artifacts.sourceFailed instead of carrying six copies under messages.*. Its two tool-output labels — Result and Live output — are the same two words the tool card uses, so they live in common.*.

The settings screen keeps a single settings.* area with panel-prefixed names (settings.keysTitle, settings.mcpTitle), rather than one area per panel: that is what the other gnexus clients do, and a slug has to be greppable from the screen it belongs to.

Backend-generated text (tool results, system prompts, WS event payloads) is still English and is out of scope for now — the interface language does not change what the agent answers. The same goes for labels the UI kit bakes into its own components rather than taking as a prop (e.g. GnSearchField's aria-label="Clear search" in vendor/gnexus-ui-kit/src/vue/components/); they are English on every gnexus client and are fixed in the kit, not here.