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Internationalization

SynthOrg's UI text is shipped in International / British English. UI text translation and right-to-left (RTL) layout support are not currently planned. Locale-aware display of numbers, dates, times, currencies, and units is unaffected by this decision: those still flow through Intl and resolve via the operator's user / company / browser / system fallback (see Regional Defaults in CLAUDE.md).

Decision

This was confirmed on 2026-04-30. The dashboard ships UI copy in International / British English (colour, behaviour, organise, centred, analyse). Strings are inline in components; there is no t() resolver, no message catalog, and no locale switcher. Currency / date / time / number formatting continues to be locale-resolved at runtime through the existing helpers; only the UI text variant is fixed.

What this means in practice

  • Component authors keep user-facing strings inline. Do not extract them into a constants module "for centralization." That has indirection cost without payoff while the product remains English-only.
  • The narrow exception is when the same long error message is used three or more times verbatim. That is deduplication, not internationalization; keep it close to the consumers (e.g. a small errors.ts next to the components).
  • Currency, date, and number formatting still flow through Intl and read the operator's settings (see Regional Defaults in CLAUDE.md). That is locale-aware display of numeric data, not translation of the surrounding UI chrome.
  • Audit findings flagging "hardcoded user-facing strings should be centralized for i18n readiness" are no longer tracked. The codebase audit's agent definition has been updated accordingly.

When to revisit

This decision is reversible. The trigger is a real, scoped requirement: a specific market, a specific customer engagement, or a regulatory translation mandate. If that arrives, open a new issue with the requirement in the body. The implementation path would then be a real translation framework (likely react-intl or i18next), not a string-constants module.