Driver, 2026-09-27: zone titles must be GENERATED from already-translated parts, because UPG-100 is
becoming a pattern and a hand-translated title is a cost paid again for every project list (7000 / 4700
/ 3000 / 2000 / 700) forever. The Arabic map reads English today because every label is a hand-written
English string.
★ MEASURED BEFORE DESIGNING, and the measurement killed the more attractive half of the idea:
country_code_label from the records API all 175 codes, every locale (formal names)
Intl.DisplayNames({type:'region'}) all 175, every locale THROWS on ISO-3
Intl.DisplayNames({type:'language'}) 213 of 2242 = 9.5% ECHOES THE CODE
LANGUAGE IS OUT. `.of('kfa')` returns the STRING "kfa" rather than throwing, so a miss prints a raw code
onto a printed poster with nothing raising a hand — and the 90.5% miss is structural, not a gap to fill:
unreached peoples speak small languages by definition and CLDR carries the big ones. This module never
names a language.
TIERS, stated in the module because a generator that silently produces a bad title is worse than one
that declines:
TIER A (3) country_code -> one country name. GENERATED
TIER B (7) country_codes -> n names + a joiner. GENERATED
TIER C (18) everything else NULL, caller keeps its label
Tier C cannot be done from countries: the 12 India/China zones are pg_slugs whose every record is ONE
country (measured: asia-india-kerala 78/78 IND), so countries would render "India" twelve times and
could not tell "Malabar Coast" from "Northwest India" — those labels are SUB-NATIONAL, and Intl has no
subdivisions. The curated-table-vs-keep-English choice is the Driver's (repo's digest item D). Returning
null until then means nothing regresses.
⚠ AND I HAD THE SOURCE PRIORITY BACKWARDS, corrected by looking at what the two sources actually say.
I preferred the records' label because it is already localized and needs no code mapping — both true,
and it generated "Lao People's Democratic Republic" for the zone whose hand-written label was "Laos": a
generated title WORSE than the one it replaced. 28 of our 175 labels are formal forms like that
("Islamic Republic of Iran", "People's Republic of China"). Intl gives the short common form in every
locale, so Intl is now first and the records are the fallback. The ISO-3→ISO-2 mapper is INJECTED, not
imported, because regions-plugin owns that table (their card) and it has not landed: without it a
3-letter code falls through to the formal name, with it the titles read "Iran + Yemen + 11 more".
THE ONLY NEW TRANSLATED STRINGS ARE TWO: zone_join "{a} + {b}" and zone_join_more "{a} + {n} more", one
pair per locale block in packet-strings.json (22 keys across 11 blocks). That is the entire translation
cost for every project list that ever uses this — a new language stays a NEW BLOCK, never a code change.
VERIFIED against the real 28 zones in en AND ar, with live Arabic records from the API:
Laos -> لاوس | Middle East Core -> إيران + اليمن + 11 أخرى | Maghreb + Egypt -> الجزائر + ليبيا + 5 أخرى
9 generated, 18 declined, in both locales. Every decline path returns null rather than a code or a
partial title, including a country_codes zone where one of the names it would SHOW is missing — a title
naming two of three countries and dropping the third silently misinforms and cannot be told apart from a
correct one downstream.
NOT WIRED IN YET: this is the generator only. The caller change (legend + poster + packet header) and
the deaf zone — global by construction, which breaks the geography-first rule and which the Driver says
is unsolved — are the next steps on the pattern card.
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