Translate a YAML file into Italian

Apostrophes, accents and capitals: Italian inside YAML syntax

Italian elides constantly: l’account, dell’utente, un’email, c’è. In YAML that apostrophe is harmless in a plain or double-quoted value, but inside a single-quoted value it must be doubled: confirm: 'Eliminare l''account?'. A lone single quote closes the string and the file fails to load.

Manuce keeps the quoting style of every value. So an English string such as 'Delete account?', which needs no apostrophe, may well need one in Italian. This is the first thing to check, and the easiest: run the returned file through a YAML parser, or just your test suite, and any broken string shows up at once.

Italian accents are mostly grave at the end of a word (è, può, città, lunedì), with a few acute ones (perché, né). They should be real accented characters, not the apostrophe workaround sometimes typed on keyboards without them (perche'), which means the file should be UTF-8. Your file’s encoding and BOM are preserved as they are, so convert a legacy-encoded source file before uploading.

Italian also capitalises far less than English: days and months are lower case (gennaio, martedì), and screen or button titles take a single initial capital (Impostazioni account, not Impostazioni Account).

Plurals, gender and register around variables

CLDR gives Italian three plural categories: one, many and other, where English has only one and other. many covers certain large round numbers, where Italian inserts “di”: 1 milione di file, whereas 2 file falls under other. Manuce adapts plural blocks to the target language; afterwards, check which categories your i18n library expects for Italian so that no key is ignored or missing.

A Rails example: one: "%{count} file eliminato" and other: "%{count} file eliminati". The noun file does not change, but the participle agrees: eliminato, eliminati, and in the feminine eliminata, eliminate (2 foto eliminate).

Gender is the real trap with variables. “Welcome, %{name}” becomes Benvenuto or Benvenuta depending on the person, which a translation cannot know. A neutral phrasing such as Le diamo il benvenuto, %{name} sidesteps the problem. Likewise the Italian article depends on the next word: il %{item} may need to be lo, l’ or la depending on the injected value, so avoid sentences where an article sits directly before a variable.

For register, the translation follows formal Italian address, Lei: Inserisca la password. Many Italian interfaces use tu instead (Inserisci la password) or the infinitive (Inserire la password). Manuce takes no register instructions, so if your product uses tu, look at the free sample before paying and plan a review of those strings.

What Manuce returns, and what it does not do

You get the same file, in the same format, ready to drop back into the project. For Rails, Symfony, Hugo and i18n-js the root language key is handled (for instance en: becomes it:). Indentation, key order, quotes, comments, line endings, encoding and BOM are preserved, as are anchors (&defaults, *defaults) and | and > block scalars. Only the values change.

Left untranslated: keys, empty values, URLs, email addresses, numbers, colours, date formats (a "%d/%m/%Y" stays as it is), identifiers and anything marked as non-translatable. Variables such as %{name} and {name} are checked: every translated value is compared with the source (variables, tags), and if a mismatch persists the source value is kept and the report says so.

The accompanying report lists the strings translated and those left unchanged, with the reason. The quote is based on the words in the values only; keys and tags are excluded.

What Manuce does not do: it takes no glossary or terminology instructions, does not choose between tu and Lei for you, cannot guess the gender of what a variable will hold and does not run your application. How the strings actually display remains yours to check.

Preparing the file and checking the Italian version

• Before uploading: convert the file to UTF-8 if needed and mark product or feature names that must stay as they are, then check them in the free sample and in the translation.
• YAML validity: load it.yml in a parser or run your tests; look first at single-quoted values containing l’, dell’ or un’.
• Diff: comparing the source with the Italian file should show changed values only, never a key or an indentation change.
• Plurals: render the strings with count set to 1, 2 and one million to see one, other and many.
• Gender and articles: reread every value where a variable follows an article or precedes an adjective or participle.
• Length: Italian usually runs longer than English (Impostazioni for “Settings”), so check narrow buttons and tabs.
• File name: rename to suit your tool, for example messages.it.yaml for Symfony or i18n/it.yaml for Hugo.

In practice

1. Convert the file to UTF-8 if necessary and mark terms that must not be translated.
2. Upload the YAML file and choose Italian: the quote appears straight away, based on the words in the values.
3. Read the free sample to judge register and terminology, then pay for the order.
4. Download the Italian file and its report, validate it with a YAML parser and test plurals and variables in the app.