Language policy

Status: accepted · Owner: Head of Design · Scope: Aleris Group · Version: v0.1 · Updated: 2026-08-06

Author: Torfinn · Audience: everyone writing in the corpus, plus the assistant

Supersedes: — · Related: [[group-scope]]

1. English is the corpus's source language

English is the Aleris Group language for this corpus: the language every page is authored in first, and the canonical version every other language is measured against. Local languages — Swedish, Norwegian, Danish — appear only for local examples; they are never a page's only source of meaning.

Implication: A page whose canonical content exists only in a local language is incomplete, not merely untranslated.

Detection of violation

Checked by whether a page's canonical source exists in English. The route-manifest gate (lib/route-manifest.test.ts, card 27) already measures this per file. Sixteen en-draft/ pages currently carry the English source correctly; the three Baseline voice guides are the one known gap — not treated as an exception to this rule, but as a tracked backlog item (card 34) to bring into compliance by authoring the missing English originals.

Origin

Harvest provenance: Extracted from the 2026-05-30 Phase 0 decision (workspace/status/changelog.md): "English-default language — English is the Aleris Group language and the source language for the whole corpus; local languages (sv/no/dk) only for local examples." That decision was never ratified into a rule with a home — it existed only as a changelog line, which workspace/decisions/language-exit-decision-brief.md §2 names as one of three causes behind the twenty language mismatches the route-manifest gate found. This page is that ratification.

External lineage: workspace/decisions/language-exit-decision-brief.md — the costed routes, and the recommendation (route B) this rule sits alongside without deciding.

Open

Whether, or how, this interacts with which language any given site or product renders is not yet decided. Card 25 accepted route B (English source, Swedish-only site) as a publishing decision. Whether that publishing choice is itself something this policy should speak to, or stays entirely separate from it, is genuinely unresolved — left open rather than guessed at.

[[group-scope]] — the jurisdictional scope the language policy serves
workspace/decisions/language-exit-decision-brief.md — the costed routes and the accepted recommendation