WA006 — English is the working language, French documentation is a product - #281
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WA006 — English is the working language, French documentation is a product#281gplanchat wants to merge 1 commit into
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…on is a product WA001 settled the language of `documentation/`, the ADRs and the Cursor rules, and said nothing about everything else the project writes. The gap filled itself with French: pull request titles and bodies, issue and review comments, commit messages, prise files, journal entries. That held while one person read the repository. It stopped holding when the work became public: a contributor cannot review a change whose justification they cannot read — and the justification is the part that carries the weight here, because this project routinely writes down *why* a fix takes the shape it takes. The cross-review of 3 September produced findings whose entire value was in their argument, and every argument was in French. WA006 therefore names English as the working language across every surface — pull requests, issues, comments, reviews, commit messages, prise files, journal entries, code identifiers, release notes — and names the single exception precisely: the `*.fr.md` translations of the user documentation are a **product for readers**, not a working language. They stay, and they stay in parity. The line that decides any future case is written into the agreement rather than left to be guessed: text addressed to a *user* of Durable follows the product; text addressed to whoever *works* on Durable is English. Two things the agreement deliberately does not do. It does not rewrite history — the value of a readable log does not survive invalidating every commit reference in every issue, ADR and journal entry that cites one. And it is not a mandate to bulk-translate: existing French text in scope is listed as debt so that it is visible rather than silent — `documentation/audit/` (22 files, landed by #271 and unknown to the three maps), `documentation/journal/inbox/` (8 entries, in a directory WA001 already required to be English), and the prise files. The pull requests, issues and comments dated 3 September and later were translated on 4 September, before this was written. They are the starting point, not part of the debt. No CI guard, and that is a choice: the rule is worth stating before it is worth automating. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Text only — one working agreement and its line in
INDEX.md. No code.Why now
WA001 settled the language of
documentation/, the ADRs and the Cursor rules. It said nothing about everything else the project writes, and the gap filled itself with French: pull request titles and bodies, issue and review comments, commit messages, prise files, journal entries.That held while one person read the repository. It stopped holding when the work became public. A contributor cannot review a change whose justification they cannot read — and here the justification is the part that carries the weight, because this project routinely writes down why a fix takes the shape it takes. The cross-review of 3 September produced findings whose entire value was in their argument; every argument was in French.
There is a quieter cost too: English documents in this repository already cite French artefacts — an
UPGRADE.mdnote pointing at a French pull request, an ADR referencing a French journal entry. A reader following those links changes language mid-sentence.The agreement
English everywhere the project writes: pull requests, issues, comments, reviews, commit messages, prise files, journal entries, code identifiers, release notes.
One exception, named precisely. The
*.fr.mdtranslations of the user documentation are a product for readers, not a working language. They stay French, and they stay in parity with their English counterpart.The line that decides any future case is written into the agreement rather than left to be guessed:
What it deliberately does not do
It does not rewrite history. The value of a readable log does not survive invalidating every commit reference in every issue, ADR and journal entry that cites one.
It is not a mandate to bulk-translate. Existing French text in scope is debt, and the agreement lists it so it is visible rather than silent:
documentation/audit/INDEX.md,LIFECYCLE.mdandHUGO.mddocumentation/journal/inbox/.worktrees/prises/PRISES.mditselfThe pull requests, issues and comments dated 3 September and later were translated on 4 September, before this was written. They are the starting point, not part of the debt.
No CI guard, and that is a choice: the rule is worth stating before it is worth automating. WA005 is the reminder that an unenforced rule is still a rule people can follow.
One thing this makes visible, and does not settle
documentation/audit/is the first thing this agreement judges, and it judges it non-conforming — in language and in placement. What happens to those 22 files is a follow-up, not a silent grandfathering. The Hugo mount (hugo.toml:42-44) keeps them off the published site, so nothing leaks in the meantime.Verification
The four cross-references in the WA resolve (
WA001,WA005,../LIFECYCLE.md,../INDEX.md), and the four figures quoted in the debt table were counted, not estimated.