Translations and Language Governance

Translations and Language Governance

English is the canonical language of the Claude Code Ultimate Guide. The French full guide is the only project-maintained translation. Chinese, Ukrainian, and Latin American Spanish repositories listed here are independent community adaptations. They are not official project editions and they are not maintained by Anthropic.

The machine-readable source of truth is machine-readable/translations.json. Its offline validator checks recorded versions, source hashes, source commits, Git lag, and paired publication metadata:

python3 scripts/check-translations.py --check

That command validates the evidence in the registry. It does not review translation quality or refresh remote repositories.

Read an Edition

• English canonical guide
• French project-maintained guide
• Simplified Chinese community adaptation
• Ukrainian community adaptation
• Latin American Spanish community adaptation

Verified Inventory

Snapshot date: 2026-08-31. Lag is measured from the recorded English source commit to canonical snapshot fb3c671cc742ce21959ebab48d3829df64250ed7. A guide commit changed guide/ultimate-guide.md; repository commits include every path. Pinning the measurement commit keeps the evidence reproducible after unrelated repository commits. Any later change to the canonical guide still invalidates its recorded commit and hash.

Language	Maintainer	Status	Version	Recorded English source	Coverage evidence	Known lag
English (en)	Florian Bruniaux	Project canonical	3.43.0	7a9f55dd39db2e075274114c3be115fe04dbfdb0	Complete canonical full guide	Current
French (fr)	Florian Bruniaux	Project-maintained translation	3.41.1	d05a95c6c58cc1bcdb4b5db9aa76ad5a119baec6	Full guide at the recorded source; semantic review not automated	Stale: 17 guide commits, 193 repository commits
Simplified Chinese (zh-CN)	JAYcodr	Unofficial community adaptation	3.41.0	7b43b9c10b241f8e196e27651e3fea6079a48d26	Maintainer reports 23 of 26 priority groups; audit found Han characters in 154 of 520 Markdown files	Stale: 31 guide commits, 257 repository commits
Ukrainian (uk)	gerasimsergey	Unofficial community adaptation	3.40.0	UNKNOWN	92 Ukrainian sidecars among 559 Markdown files; 110 files contain Cyrillic	Exact commit lag UNKNOWN
Latin American Spanish (es-419)	Richardls	Unofficial community adaptation	3.32.2	11dadc28156112cb17cf2935244b3f9d6ccf01ee	330 of 335 Markdown files contain Spanish diacritics; the translation commit reports about 360 files	Stale: 115 guide commits, 525 repository commits

The file counts are target-script indicators, not semantic coverage scores. A file can contain a target-language character while retaining untranslated passages. Conversely, code-only files can be correctly adapted without target-language prose.

The public landing catalog lists 13 French and English whitepaper pairs and 58 French and English recap-card pairs. This repository contains only 6 paired whitepaper .qmd sources plus one French-only source with prefix 03; the remaining public whitepaper source files are not present here. All 58 recap-card source pairs are present. These publications are topic adaptations and summaries, not line-equivalent translations of the full guide. Their content freshness against the canonical guide is UNKNOWN until a dedicated content audit records a source baseline.

Chinese Attribution and Source Correction

The Chinese repository’s README explicitly identifies the work as a Chinese translation, credits Florian Bruniaux, links the original repository, and keeps the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Its attribution is therefore present.

Its TRANSLATION_STATUS file labels dbeb30c as the upstream commit. Git history shows that dbeb30c is the community repository’s first Chinese README translation commit. The parent, 7b43b9c10b241f8e196e27651e3fea6079a48d26, is the matching English source baseline. The registry records the parent and preserves this evidence note so the incorrect label is not repeated as fact.

Attribution and freshness are separate questions. Correct attribution does not make an edition official or current.

Official Translation Priority

The next translation investment is French maintenance, not an official Chinese edition. Before another official locale starts, the French full guide must meet both gates:

1. The recorded source version and SHA-256 must match the English canonical guide.
2. A documented review must cover navigation, examples, links, terminology, and visible untranslated sections.

Run the strict gate when planning a release or a new official locale:

python3 scripts/check-translations.py --check --require-current-maintained

This strict command currently fails because French is behind English. That failure is expected evidence, not a broken validator.

Official and Community Labels

Within this registry, official means maintained by this guide project. It never means official Anthropic documentation. A community adaptation remains community unless its maintainer, review process, source baseline, release workflow, and ongoing ownership are explicitly transferred and accepted.

Community links must display the target language, independent maintainer, unofficial status, last verification date, version, source commit or UNKNOWN, coverage boundary, and known lag.

Language Navigation and SEO

Readers can use normal links between this page, the English canonical guide, the maintained French file, and community repositories. The site does not publish hreflang for community adaptations because they are cross-domain, not demonstrably page-equivalent, not synchronized, and do not provide verified reciprocal annotations.

Every locally hosted page keeps a self-referencing canonical URL. Add hreflang only when equivalent indexable pages exist, reciprocal links are verified, and the locale pair has coordinated maintenance. Do not use x-default as a substitute for that proof.

The landing XML sitemap should contain the local translation-status page after deployment. Community repository URLs do not belong in the local sitemap.

Evidence Boundary

The public-repository discovery pass searched GitHub repository names and README attribution, then inspected the repositories found. It identified the three community adaptations above. Private, renamed, unindexed, and non-GitHub translations remain outside the measured scope.

The last verification date is not a synchronization claim. Remote repository heads and coverage observations can change after the snapshot. Follow the refresh workflow in docs/workflows/translations.md before updating them.