Polish translation — the fix queue¶

Status: open queue, nothing submitted. The PR freeze applies; this page is the list to work from when it lifts.

The Polish locale went in as #1565 ("complete the Polish Priority 0 translation", merged as bee44de9, 2026-08-20). It is complete and token-faithful. It also reads, in several places, like a database form rather than like Polish — and in a few places it is outright ungrammatical the moment an admin picks the poll vocabulary instead of the election one.

This page separates those two problems, because they have different fixes and only one of them is waiting on a maintainer.

The trigger¶

Live, public, reproducible: https://bettervoting.com/vx89hj/results?lng=pl

Wybory — nazwa:
BV2285 — Three candidates, three possible winners — a STAR tie no rung can break

"Wybory — nazwa:" is not a sentence. It is a field label with the noun stranded in front of it in the nominative. Natural Polish is "Nazwa wyborów:" — genitive — and the whole reason it wasn't written that way is the next section.

The same screen also shows "UDOSTĘPNIJ: WYBORY" (share button) and "Szczegóły rywalizacji". Both are discussed below.

Why the stiffness is there¶

useSubstitutedTranslation (util.tsx:176) spreads the whole keyword.<election|poll> block into i18next's interpolation values, and then gives every string value of 3+ characters a capitalised twin:

values[`capital_${key}`] = capitalize(value)

So {{election}} is wybory or ankieta, {{candidate}} is kandydat or opcja, {{race}} is rywalizacja or pytanie — one form each, always nominative. A Polish sentence that puts the noun anywhere but the subject slot needs a case the block cannot supply, and a sentence whose verb or participle agrees with the noun cannot agree with both vocabularies at once (wybory is plural, ankieta is feminine singular).

The translation's own header comment records the workaround:

  # Election vs Poll Terms
  # NOTE: these are interpolated in the NOMINATIVE case; the surrounding strings
  # are phrased so the nominative reads correctly.

"Phrased so the nominative reads correctly" is what produced — nazwa:, — zakończenie:, Udostępnij: and Ładowanie:. Every one of them is a dodge around a missing case form.

What is already on record upstream — do not re-file¶

#1574 — "Interpolated nouns can't be grammatical in gendered languages" — already documents the mechanism, names Polish as the worst-hit language, and offers three directions (per-vocabulary _election/_poll string variants · i18next context · accept the stiffness and document it). It is OPEN and awaiting maintainer direction, and it is PARKED §4.

This page is not a second report of that. It is the observation that most of what makes Polish read badly does not actually need that decision — see the tiers below. Only the last tier is blocked.

The mechanism nobody used yet¶

Because the vocabulary block is spread wholesale, any key added under keyword.election: / keyword.poll: becomes an interpolation variable, with a capital_ twin, with no frontend change at all — and because each locale file supplies its own keyword block, keys added to pl.yaml exist only for Polish. No other locale, and no English string, sees them.

That makes a fourth option available that #1574 does not list: give Polish its own agreement kit in its own file.

  election:
    election: wybory            # nominative — unchanged, still what {{election}} means
    election_gen: wyborów       # → "Nazwa wyborów:"
    election_acc: wybory        # → "Udostępnij wybory"
    election_starts: zaczynają się
    election_ends: kończą się
    candidate_only: jedyny      # the agreeing adjective, not a noun

  poll:
    election: ankieta
    election_gen: ankiety       # → "Nazwa ankiety:"
    election_acc: ankietę       # → "Udostępnij ankietę"
    election_starts: zaczyna się
    election_ends: kończy się
    candidate_only: jedyna

Name every added key after the noun it belongs to (election_gen, candidate_only), never as a bare word: the block is merged under the call-site values, so a generic name like only or starts could one day be shadowed by a v passed from a component.

Tier 1 — pl.yaml only, no upstream decision needed¶

Six strings whose only problem is the dodge. Fixing them is a Polish-file diff; nothing else in the app changes.

Key	Ships today	Renders (election / poll)	Proposed	Renders
`results.election_title`	`{{capital_election}} — nazwa:`	Wybory — nazwa: / Ankieta — nazwa:	`Nazwa {{election_gen}}:`	Nazwa wyborów: / Nazwa ankiety:
`ballot_submitted.end_time`	`{{capital_election}} — zakończenie: {{date}} o {{time}}`	Wybory — zakończenie: …	`Koniec {{election_gen}}: {{date}} o {{time}}`	Koniec wyborów: … / Koniec ankiety: …
`results.admin_results_toggle`	`{{capital_election}} - wyniki są publiczne`	Wybory - wyniki są publiczne	`Wyniki {{election_gen}} są publiczne`	Wyniki wyborów są publiczne / Wyniki ankiety są publiczne
`results.loading_election`	`Ładowanie: {{capital_election}}...`	Ładowanie: Wybory...	`Ładowanie {{election_gen}}…`	Ładowanie wyborów… / Ładowanie ankiety…
`share.button`	`Udostępnij: {{capital_election}}`	UDOSTĘPNIJ: WYBORY	`Udostępnij {{election_acc}}`	Udostępnij wybory / Udostępnij ankietę
`share.button_results`	`Udostępnij wyniki: {{capital_election}}`	Udostępnij wyniki: Wybory	`Udostępnij wyniki {{election_gen}}`	Udostępnij wyniki wyborów / … ankiety

Two of these carry a second, unrelated defect worth folding into the same diff: admin_results_toggle uses an ASCII hyphen where every sibling string uses an em dash, and loading_election uses ... where election_history.loading uses ….

A zero-key variant exists for election_title if the agreement kit is judged too much: {{capital_election}}: alone renders "Wybory:" / "Ankieta:", both grammatical, both ordinary. It is worse than "Nazwa wyborów:" and better than what ships.

support_blurb belongs here too, and is the clearest illustration of the cost of the dodge:

# today  — the noun is parenthesised because it cannot decline
support_blurb: 'Aby uzyskać pomoc dotyczącą tego głosowania ({{election}}), napisz na adres …'
# proposed
support_blurb: 'Aby uzyskać pomoc dotyczącą {{election_gen}}, napisz na adres …'

Tier 2 — actually ungrammatical under the poll vocabulary¶

These are not stiffness. Under term_type: poll they are wrong Polish, and two of them need no new keys at all — only a rephrasing that avoids the agreeing word.

Key(s)	Ships today	election	poll	Fix
`ballot.methods.{rcv,stv,ranked_robin}.instruction_bullets[2]`	`{{capital_candidates}} pozostawieni bez pozycji trafiają na koniec`	Kandydaci pozostawieni ✓	Opcje pozostawieni ✗ (needs pozostawione)	rephrase: `{{capital_candidates}} bez przyznanej pozycji trafiają na koniec` — no participle, agrees with both. No new keys.
`results.single_candidate_result`	`{{name}} to jedyny {{candidate}}, więc wygrywa automatycznie`	jedyny kandydat ✓	jedyny opcja ✗ (needs jedyna opcja)	`{{name}} to {{candidate_only}} {{candidate}}, …` — agreement kit
`election_home.start_time` / `end_time` / `ended_time`	`{{capital_election}} zaczynają się {{datetime}}`	Wybory zaczynają się ✓	Ankieta zaczynają się ✗ (needs zaczyna się)	`{{capital_election}} {{election_starts}} {{datetime, datetime}}` — agreement kit

Tier 3 — genuinely blocked on #1574¶

Key	Why the kit isn't enough
`ballot.this_election_uses`	`Te {{election}} wykorzystują …` → "Te ankieta wykorzystują" — demonstrative and verb both disagree, and the sentence continues for two more clauses. Patching it word-by-word from the vocabulary block would leave a sentence assembled from four variables. This is the string #1574 exists for; it wants a whole-sentence `_election` / `_poll` variant.
`ballot.this_election_uses_draggable`	same sentence, longer

Leave both on #1574. They are already quoted in that issue.

Not a Polish problem — flagged so nobody "fixes" it here¶

results.details (Szczegóły rywalizacji, visible on the screen above) and results.not_enough_candidates hardcode the race and candidate vocabularies. So does English: en.yaml says Race Details and "This race currently only has one candidate" with no interpolation at all. Polish is faithfully mirroring an English-side gap — the same one Germany's #1560 hit from the other direction. If it is worth fixing it is worth fixing in en.yaml first, for every locale at once.

Housekeeping found on the way¶

results.single_vote is a dead key in three locales. It exists in es.yaml, pl.yaml and pt-BR.yaml and nowhere else in the repo — not in en.yaml, not in any component (git grep -l single_vote on main returns exactly those three files). Three translators translated a string the app never asks for; it presumably survived in a copy of an older en.yaml. Proposal: delete from all three. This is the kind of thing the #1575 locale check should also catch — a key present in a locale but absent from English is as reportable as an untranslated value.
keyword.yes / keyword.no are still Yes / No in pl.yaml (lines 394–395) — but they are also unused: nothing in the frontend reads {{yes}}, {{no}} or keyword.yes. English has the same pair. The fix is deletion upstream, not translation; do not "translate" them into Tak / Nie and leave dead keys behind.
Coverage: 258 of 860 leaf keys (~30%), which is the Priority 0 voter-facing scope by design — everything else falls back to English, as BV240o expects. Stated so the number isn't rediscovered as a defect.
A footnote for whoever writes the #1575 checker: PyYAML resolves yes / no / on / off as booleans (YAML 1.1), so a Python checker silently drops those keys and compares True to True. The app's loader (@rsbuild/plugin-yaml → js-yaml 4, YAML 1.2 core) does not. Load with a 1.2-compatible loader or the check has a blind spot exactly where an untranslated value sits.

What has and has not been observed¶

Observed in production, on the screen linked at the top: election_title, share.button, results.details, preliminary_title, tie_title, random_tiebreak_subtitle, vote_count, method_context, learn_link_text, and the STAR round titles and descriptions.

Read from source, not observed: every poll-vocabulary rendering in the tables above. That election uses the election vocabulary, so "Ankieta zaczynają się" and "jedyny opcja" are derived by substitution, not screenshotted. Per the repo's own rule, they are predictions until a poll-term election is opened in Polish and photographed — that is the first step when this queue is picked up, and it is cheap: one poll-vocabulary election, ?lng=pl, one pass over the ballot and results screens.

#1574 — the gendered-noun issue this page sits under · PARKED §4
#1575 — the locale CI check · PARKED §5
#1556 — the docs/i18n program index
#1565 — the Polish completion PR that shipped the current wording
BV240o — the non-English fallback case