backfill-en-ca

name	backfill-en-ca
description	Fill in missing translations in en-CA/firefox-ios.xliff by adapting the en-US source into Canadian English, following the style already established in the file. Use when asked to complete, backfill, or fill the untranslated strings in en-CA (English, Canada), or to check how many en-CA strings are missing.

Backfill missing en-CA translations

en-CA/firefox-ios.xliff is a same-language localization: it starts from the en-US reference and changes only what Canadian English requires. Almost everything is a verbatim copy of the source, so backfilling is mostly mechanical — the value is in getting the handful of real deviations right and in not touching anything else.

Hard constraints

• Only add <target> elements to <trans-unit>s that currently have none. Never modify, reorder, or delete an existing <target>, <source>, <note>, or <trans-unit>.
• Never remove obsolete strings. Units whose ID/file pair no longer exists in en-US stay exactly as they are. Do not add targets to them either — Pontoon removes them on its own schedule.
• Only en-CA/firefox-ios.xliff is edited. en-US/, templates/, other locales, and .github/ are out of scope.
• A new <target> goes immediately after <source>, before <note>, with no attributes (no state, no xml:space — that lives on the trans-unit).
• Do not hand-edit the XML. Use scripts/apply_targets.py, which writes through the repo's write_xliff() and round-trips the file byte-identically (verified).

Workflow

1. List what's missing

   .venv/bin/python .claude/skills/backfill-en-ca/scripts/report_untranslated.py
   

   Writes /tmp/en-CA-missing.json ([{file, id, source, note}, ...]) and prints a summary: translated / missing / obsolete counts. Obsolete units are reported for information only.

2. Translate each entry by applying the rules below. Produce a JSON file shaped like:

   [{"file": "Client/en.lproj/Localizable.strings", "id": "Foo.Bar.v155", "target": "…"}]
   

   file + id together are the key — IDs repeat across <file> sections (15 duplicates today), so id alone is ambiguous.

   Work in batches you can eyeball. Most entries will be a verbatim copy of source; spend the attention on the ones that aren't.

3. Apply

   .venv/bin/python .claude/skills/backfill-en-ca/scripts/apply_targets.py /tmp/en-CA-new.json
   

   Refuses to overwrite an existing target or to touch a unit missing from en-US, and reports anything it skipped.

4. Verify

   .venv/bin/python .claude/skills/backfill-en-ca/scripts/check_style.py
   git diff --stat en-CA/
   git diff en-CA/ | grep -c '^-'   # expect 1 (the --- diff header) — no deletions
   

   check_style.py flags placeholder mismatches, typography drift, leftover American -our/-re spellings, and over-applied -ise/-yse forms. Read its output and fix real hits; it also re-reports pre-existing legacy deviations, so compare against a run on a clean checkout if unsure.

Style rules

Derived from a full comparison of the 1,847 existing en-CA targets against en-US (25 differ from source; the rest are byte-identical).

R1 — Default: copy the source verbatim

98.6% of existing targets equal their source exactly. If no rule below applies, the target is the source string, character for character.

R2 — -our spellings (always applied, 8/8)

color → colour, favorite → favourite, neighborhood → neighbourhood, and the same for inflections (colors → colours, colored, favourites). Extend to behaviour, honour, labour, flavour, humour, rumour, odour, vapour, savour, endeavour if they appear.

Exception, as in British English: -orous/-oration derivatives keep the short form — humorous, coloration, honorary, laborious.

R3 — -re spellings (applied, 1/1)

center → centre (centered → centred, centre of the toolbar). Same for theatre, fibre, litre, metre as a unit of length. Keep meter when it means a measuring device or a UI meter.

R4 — Keep -ize / -yze (never changed, 22/22)

Canadian English uses the -ize forms, same as en-US. Do not switch to -ise/-yse: customize, customization, organization, personalize, summarize, recognize, optimize, synchronize, realize, analyze, paralyze all stay.

R5 — Keep these American forms (never changed in en-CA)

license / Licenses (noun and verb — do not write licence), install, practice, program, check (verb and noun — never cheque), tire, defense, offense, dialog (UI sense), catalog, gray when it appears in a technical/colour-token context. Evidence: license 1/1, install 2/2, check 6/6 unchanged.

R6 — Doubled consonants (low evidence — flag it)

Canadian English prefers travelled, cancelled, labelled, modelled, fuelled, marvellous, enrolled. The one existing data point (Download Cancelled) already had the doubled form in the source, so the file doesn't actually settle this. Apply the doubled form, and call it out explicitly in your report so the user can veto it.

R7 — Typography must match the source exactly

Copy the source's punctuation characters as-is: curly apostrophe ’ (never '), ellipsis … (never ...), em dash — (never -), en dash –, curly quotes, narrow/non-breaking spaces, emoji. This was fixed by hand once already (commit 6b4ba8b, "en-GB/en-CA: fix typography consistency with en-US") — don't reintroduce it. The file stores literal Unicode, never numeric entities.

R8 — Placeholders are untouchable

%@, %1$@, %2$@, %d, %1$d must appear the same number of times, in the same order, with the same indices as in the source. Never reorder, renumber, translate, or add spacing around them.

R9 — Preserve the source's capitalization

Copy the source's case. The existing file has ~8 case-only deviations in both directions (Get Help → Get help, Recently Closed → Recently closed, but also New tab → New Tab, Card Removed → Card removed). These are inconsistent legacy noise — do not imitate the pattern and do not "fix" the existing entries.

R10 — Preserve whitespace

Copy leading/trailing spaces and embedded newlines from the source. (Some legacy targets stripped a trailing space or collapsed a newline; treat those as artifacts, not precedent.)

R11 — Never translate brand and proper names

Firefox, Focus, Klar, Pocket, Mozilla, Wayback Machine, Internet Archive, Face ID, Wi-Fi, iOS, Wrexham A.F.C., and anything supplied through a placeholder.

R12 — Don't generalize one-off wording changes

The file contains a single lexical substitution (Log in → Sign in). Treat it as a historical one-off: keep the source's wording everywhere else. If a new string seems to need a wording change beyond spelling, leave it as the source and raise it with the user instead of inventing a house style.

R13 — Fixing source typos

An error occured → An error occurred was corrected in en-CA. Obvious source typos may be fixed silently in the target, but always report them so the user can file the fix upstream in firefox-ios.