Contributing Translations

Claudette is built by a small team and a growing community. One of the most impactful contributions you can make — especially if you’re not a developer — is translating the app into your language.

Just want to switch your language?

If you’re looking to use Claudette in another language rather than contribute a translation, see Internationalization for where to find the language picker and what’s translated today.

What’s localized today

The app ships with five complete translations:

• English (en) is the baseline: the full UI (buttons, tooltips, settings, modals, chat, sidebar) plus the system tray menu, native notifications, and the quit-confirm dialog.
• Spanish (es) — complete.
• Brazilian Portuguese (pt-BR) — complete.
• Japanese (ja) — complete.
• Simplified Chinese (zh-CN) — complete.

Each translation covers the full UI plus the system tray menu, native notifications, and the quit-confirm dialog.

Missing translation keys fall back to English at runtime, so a partially translated language is safe to ship — anything not yet translated simply shows in English until someone fills it in.

How it works

Translations live in the Claudette repository as plain JSON files. Each language gets its own folder, and translating is mostly a matter of editing key/value pairs:

• Frontend strings live in src/ui/src/locales/<lang>/ and are split across five files by area (common, chat, modals, settings, sidebar).
• Tray, notification, and quit-dialog strings live in src/locales/<lang>/tray.json.

Both sides use the same {{name}} placeholder syntax for inserting dynamic values, so you only need to learn one convention.

How to contribute a translation

1. Open an issue on GitHub to claim the language you want to translate. This stops two contributors from duplicating effort.
2. Fork the repository and create a feature branch.
3. Copy the English locale folders to a new folder named with your language code (fr, de, pt, pt-BR, etc.) and translate the values. Keep the keys exactly as they are.
4. Register your language so the app knows it exists — this is a small change to two files (one TypeScript, one Rust). The exact steps are in the Contributing Guide on GitHub.
5. Open a pull request. CI runs a key-parity check on the backend (src/locales/<lang>/tray.json) that fails if any of the locales it knows about disagree on which keys exist — note that adding a brand-new backend locale also means extending that test to include your locale. The frontend doesn’t enforce parity; partial translations are fine and rely on English fallback for any keys you haven’t filled in yet.

If you only want to fix a typo or polish wording in an existing language, the process is even simpler — edit the relevant JSON file and open a PR. No registration step is required.

A few translator tips

• Don’t translate {{placeholder}} tokens. They’re swapped in at runtime; translating them will break the rendered string.
• Watch for tight UI space. Some labels (especially in the sidebar and tray menu) have limited room. Prefer concise wording where the language allows.
• Plural forms use i18next’s _one / _other key convention. If English provides both, please provide both in your language too — i18next will pick the right one based on the count.

Questions?

Hop into our Discord and ask in the contributors channel, or open a discussion on GitHub. Translations are a fantastic way to make Claudette accessible to people who would otherwise have to work in a second language — thank you for helping out.