Language reference

Synix ships compiled, offline catalogs for English, French, German, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Dutch, Swedish, Czech, Ukrainian, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian Bokmål, Greek, Hungarian, Romanian, Hindi, Thai, Bulgarian, Croatian, Catalan, Slovak, Slovenian, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian (35 language options). Every selectable language must contain every entry in the neutral English catalog; partial preview catalogs are no longer used for these languages.

The language picker displays each language's own name. Regional aliases use the corresponding available catalog; generic Norwegian (no / no-NO) selects Bokmål. Nynorsk (nn / nn-NO) is a different language and is not advertised as supported.

Comprehensive language target

The target is every language exposed by Windows/.NET, with separate writing systems where needed. This is a roadmap, not a claim that every target is already translated. The coverage inventory lists the complete current catalogs and every outstanding language/script target. Country variants may share a language catalog; they are not counted as independently translated languages.

The app only offers catalogs with every English source key present and nonblank. Preview catalogs, stale keys and English-only placeholder copies are excluded. Unknown writing systems do not silently borrow a different script: for example, Latin Hindi is not the default Hindi translation. Explicit script catalogs keep their script code, not a guessed country code.

Run dotnet run --project Tools/LanguageCoverage -- --check from the repository root to check all source catalogs, including files that the app would exclude. Use --markdown to print an updated inventory. This tool is offline, read-only and not shipped in the installed application. The culture inventory depends on the Windows/.NET globalization data on the machine; there is no hard-coded global language count.

Add translations in complete-language batches. Before exposing a new catalog:

1. Translate every source entry, including help, warnings, themes and accessibility labels, preserving the technical content described below.
2. Check placeholders and technical syntax and review the meaning of critical security, recovery, update and uninstall instructions.
3. Review fonts, long labels, navigation, dialogs and live language switching. Right-to-left languages additionally need bidirectional controls and mirroring without changing passwords, paths, commands or server data.
4. Regenerate the coverage inventory. Catalog completeness is a structural safeguard, not proof of translation accuracy or finished RTL layout.

Coverage includes the dashboard, setup and review, settings, game workspaces, mod and plugin management, configuration editing, validation and error messages, tooltips, accessibility labels, first-start guidance, the offline Help Center, and built-in game-support descriptions. The Help Center searches both the selected language and the English source, so exact commands and technical terms remain searchable.

Files and maintenance

• Strings.resx contains the English source and remains the safe runtime fallback for unknown or future resources.
• Strings.<culture>.resx contains each translation. These catalogs are discovered at build time, including for the single-EXE release.
• SemanticResources.<culture>.ps1 and OperationalTranslations.<culture>.ps1 maintain named resources and dynamic interface fragments for the original language generators.
• GenerateEnglishResources.ps1 refreshes extracted text while preserving named resources and Content.* entries. The French, German, and Spanish generators also preserve catalog entries outside their translation tables.

Use LocalizationManager.Get or a named binding for new interface text. For Synix-authored offline articles and catalog descriptions, GetContent uses a Content.* key derived from the first 20 hexadecimal SHA-256 digits of the English UTF-8 text, with line endings normalized to LF. Add that key and its translations to every catalog when adding or changing the source. Use FormatContent for templates and pass variable values as arguments, rather than building a different source key for each server.

Edit the catalogs directly for languages without a generator. PowerShell files are development tools only: users do not need PowerShell, an internet connection, an AI model, or a translation service to change languages. Run the maintenance generators with PowerShell 7 on Windows so their UTF-8 source text is read correctly.

Data and technical syntax

Translate Synix's wording, not user data. Keep game names and identifiers, passwords, map and mode values, configuration keys and values, console commands, launch arguments, paths, filenames, ports, tokens, protocol names, and original game-server output unchanged. Technical support exports retain their original data for diagnosis; their surrounding interface is localized. SetDataText protects labels that display user values even when a value happens to be an interface word such as "Save".

Preserve placeholders, URLs, command examples, file-filter separators, and paragraph breaks. Language changes must not modify saved settings or silently reset the selected game, help topic, search text, or editable input.

Validation and translation review

CompleteLanguageCoverageTests, LocalizationTests, and AdditionalLanguageTests check all selectable languages, not just the original three translations. They cover exact-culture resource completeness, placeholder preservation, offline article coverage and technical examples, live switching, aliases, unchanged user input, fallback behavior, and layout. The source guard also includes the Help windows and visible tooltip text.

The expanded catalogs include machine-assisted translations. Structural tests and sample reviews do not replace native-speaker review of terminology and meaning, particularly for security, networking, licensing, and recovery instructions. Corrections should update the relevant catalog entry without altering technical syntax or the English source to hide a missing translation.

The Catalan, Slovak, and Slovenian catalogs started from offline, machine-assisted drafts using the corresponding English-to-language Argos Translate 1.9 packages, based on OPUS-MT by Jörg Tiedemann and Santhosh Thottingal (the package identifies its source model as CC BY 4.0). The Latvian and Lithuanian catalogs use the OPUS-MT transformer-big models for English–Latvian and English–Lithuanian by the Helsinki-NLP team (CC BY 4.0), also run offline. The Estonian draft used the English–Estonian 1.9 package by Aleksey Kutashov, trained with OPUS and the other corpora credited in that package's README. Headings, technical tokens, key actions and safety-sensitive passages were corrected separately. No translation model, Python runtime, translation cache or online service is shipped with Synix. This does not replace native-speaker review or establish an authoritative legal translation; the original English licence remains unchanged.