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Flagpost

Interface languages

Flagpost’s web interface is translatable, and ships live in four languages:

  • English
  • Français
  • Español
  • Polski

Each carries over two thousand translated UI strings. It’s a procurement answer for the audience Flagpost is built for — universities and national organisers running events in their own language.

Choosing a language

Section titled “Choosing a language”

Inside the app, the globe menu in the top bar (between the help and theme menus) switches language. On the pages you reach before signing in — login, registration, the public spectator boards — an inline language dropdown does the same.

The choice is a per-device cookie, not an account setting, so it follows the browser rather than the login. A first-time visitor gets their browser’s preferred language if it’s one Flagpost ships, and English otherwise.

What’s translated — and what isn’t

Section titled “What’s translated — and what isn’t”

The boundary is deliberate and worth stating plainly:

  • The UI chrome is translated — buttons, labels, navigation, settings, the whole operator and competitor surface.
  • Operator content is never translated. Challenge text, announcements, rules, custom pages and certificate templates are your words, in the language you wrote them — the platform leaves them exactly as authored.
  • Backend messages are still English. A handful of server-generated strings — some API error messages and outbound emails — remain English for now; translating them is a known follow-up.

Right-to-left layouts and full backend translation are future work.

Contributing a translation

Section titled “Contributing a translation”

Translations flow through Crowdin. The English source of truth is frontend/messages/en.json; Crowdin machine pre-translates, human reviewers refine, and the results land back in the repository as messages/<locale>.json. A continuous-integration check holds every catalogue to the English source’s keys and its ICU placeholders and tags, so a translation can’t ship with a missing variable or a broken plural. Any string a locale hasn’t translated yet falls back to English, per string, until review fills it in.

Adding a new language is a small configuration change plus a Crowdin catalogue — the machinery to hold the rest is already in place (ADR-0029). If you’d like to help translate or correct a locale, open an issue or a discussion on GitHub.