Translate a JSON i18n file into Italian

Plurals, register and accents: what Italian changes in your strings

Italian uses the Latin alphabet, left to right. Coming from English, expect Italian strings to run noticeably longer, so tight buttons and tab labels are the first place to look; coming from French, length stays roughly the same. Three points need attention in a JSON resource file.

• Plurals. The CLDR rules for Italian define three categories: one, many and other. many applies to certain large round numbers such as millions, where Italian uses di: “1 milione di messaggi”. An ICU source message with only one and other gets the missing category: {count, plural, one {# messaggio} many {# messaggi} other {# messaggi}}.
• Register. The register used is the formal Lei: “Inserisca la Sua password” rather than “Inserisci la tua password”. Many Italian consumer apps address users as tu; Manuce does not take register instructions, so if your product uses tu, judge from the free sample before ordering.
• Accents. Italian distinguishes grave and acute accents: è (is), perché, più, città. The capital form is È, not the makeshift E' often found in hand-typed strings. A UTF-8 file keeps these characters as they are.

Apostrophes, articles and agreement: Italian traps around placeholders

Italian elides and inflects heavily, which causes trouble exactly where a placeholder stands in for a word.

• An apostrophe before a brace. In ICU messages (react-intl, next-intl), a straight apostrophe immediately before { starts a quoted literal: Eliminare l'{item}? would display {item} instead of the value. Safe forms are a doubled apostrophe, l''{item}, or a typographic one, l’{item}. Check these strings: the placeholder is present in the file, and the fault only shows at render time.
• An article before a placeholder. Italian chooses between il, lo, la and l’ according to gender and the first letter of the next word. In front of {product}, the translation cannot know the value; a construction without an article, such as Prodotto: {product}, works in every case.
• Participle agreement. “{name} è stato aggiunto” assumes a masculine subject. If the source has a gender select, each branch is translated with its own agreement (aggiunto, aggiunta); without one, only a single form is possible, usually the masculine.
• Punctuation and quotes. Italian sets colons and question marks directly after the word and often uses « caporali » quotation marks. Straight double quotes inside a JSON value must stay escaped (\").

What Manuce returns, and what it does not do

Upload the JSON file as it comes out of your repository, flat or nested, including arrays of strings. You get the same file back: indentation, key order, quotes, comments, line endings, encoding and BOM preserved. Only the values change: "settings.title": "Settings" becomes "settings.title": "Impostazioni", with the key untouched.

• Placeholders such as {name}, {{count}} and %s, and ICU messages (plural, select), are checked string by string: same variables, same number of times.
• Each translated value is compared with its source (placeholders, tags); if a mismatch persists, the source value is kept and the report says so.
• Left untranslated: keys, empty values, URLs, email addresses, numbers, colours, date formats, identifiers and anything marked as non-translatable.
• The report lists the strings translated and those left as they were, with the reason.

The price is based on the words in the values; keys and tags are excluded. Manuce does not run your app or see your screens, and it does not take glossaries or terminology instructions. A feature name you want kept in English, such as “Dashboard”, is best checked in the free sample and then in the delivered file. Manuce does not provide certified (sworn) translation, which in any case does not apply to an interface file.

Preparing the file and checking the Italian result

1. Start from the complete, up-to-date source file, for example en.json, and decide on the target name your setup expects: it.json, locales/it/common.json and so on.
2. Identify source strings where a noun with an article will be replaced by a placeholder: these are the first to review in Italian.
3. With i18next, plurals use suffixed keys (_one, _other): check in the returned file and the report whether the forms Italian needs are there, and add a _many key if your configuration expects one.
4. Make sure your code formats numbers and dates with the it locale: 1.234,56 and 31/12/2025 in Italian. These formats come from Intl or your library, not from the translated values.
5. Run the app in Italian and check narrow buttons, accented capitals (È), apostrophes before braces and consistent use of Lei.

In practice

1. Upload your JSON i18n file: the quote appears straight away, based on the words in the values.
2. Choose Italian and a tier, then read the free sample to judge register and terms you want kept.
3. Pay and download the Italian file within minutes, with the report of strings translated and left unchanged.
4. Put the file in your project, review plurals and apostrophes before placeholders, then test the screens.