backfill-en-ca

name	backfill-en-ca
description	Fill in missing en-CA translations in this repo from the en-US source, following the established en-CA style (Canadian spelling, typographic apostrophes, en-US wording otherwise). Use when asked to complete, backfill, or update the en-CA locale, or to check en-CA strings against its style rules.

Backfill en-CA

en-CA is en-US with Canadian spelling and a few terminology fixes — 98.9% of its strings are byte-identical to the source. Backfilling is therefore mostly mechanical, and the scripts here do the mechanical part; your job is the ~1% that needs judgement.

Read reference/style-rules.md before writing or reviewing any string. reference/analysis.md records how those rules were derived and how far they can be trusted.

Paths

• locale: en-CA/ in this repo
• source: ~/mozilla-source/git/firefox-quarantine (same relative paths)
• moz.l10n tooling: ~/mozilla-source/git/firefox-quarantine/.venv/bin/ (l10n-lint, l10n-compare)

Both are overridable with --locale / --ref.

Workflow

Run from .claude/skills/backfill-en-ca/scripts.

1. See what is missing (nothing is written):

   python3 backfill.py --report
   

   It prints each missing entry exactly as it would be inserted, with !! warnings for anything ambiguous. Take a subtree to narrow it down: python3 backfill.py --report browser/browser.

2. Review the proposed text before writing. For every entry check it against reference/style-rules.md:

   • Canadian spelling applied, -ize endings left alone.
   • Nothing changed inside placeables, markup, URLs, or identifiers.
   • Access key present in its own label; if the label's spelling changed, pick a letter that is still there.
   • Every !! warning resolved by hand (Cert → Certificate, noun licence vs verb license, and so on).
   • The en-US wording is otherwise kept as-is — do not rephrase.

3. Apply:

   python3 backfill.py --apply
   

   Entries are inserted at their en-US position with their comments, and a ## group header is added when the group does not exist yet. Existing translations are never rewritten and en-CA-only (obsolete) strings are never removed.

4. Fix by hand whatever step 2 turned up, editing the inserted strings directly.

5. Verify:

   Q=~/mozilla-source/git/firefox-quarantine
   $Q/.venv/bin/python check_style.py                 # style rules + access keys + placeholders
   $Q/.venv/bin/l10n-compare --source $Q ../../../../en-CA   # nothing missing
   $Q/.venv/bin/l10n-lint ../../../../en-CA           # parses (ignore "unsupported <file>" lines)
   git -C ../../../.. diff --stat en-CA
   

   check_style.py should report only the 2 known pre-existing problems listed in reference/analysis.md; anything else is yours. It takes paths to limit the scan, and --quotes to also list legacy ‘…’ strings.

Scripts

• ca_adapt.py — the deterministic en-US → en-CA transform (spelling, apostrophes, quotes, whitespace) plus the "needs judgement" warnings. python3 ca_adapt.py "some text" adapts one string; python3 ca_adapt.py --selftest checks the rules still behave. Stdlib only.
• backfill.py — finds missing entries and inserts them. Stdlib only.
• check_style.py — style/consistency checker. Needs moz.l10n, so run it with the quarantine venv's python.

If a rule turns out to be wrong or a new pattern shows up, update ca_adapt.py and reference/style-rules.md together, then re-run ca_adapt.py --selftest.

Don't

• Don't remove obsolete strings that exist only in en-CA.
• Don't reword, re-capitalise, or re-punctuate strings that already exist.
• Don't touch intl.accept_languages or the hunspell dictionary in en-CA/extensions/spellcheck/.
• Don't commit or push unless asked.