Talk to Claude in your own language, keep your vault in English

[andreanovix]

Context

Hi, and thanks for the skill. I've been running it on a personal vault (v0.16.0, macOS) and it's been working really well.

I'm a native Italian speaker, and I've been wondering whether it makes sense to write the note bodies in Italian while keeping the scaffolding in English: frontmatter keys, template headings, folder and file names, Kanban columns, the ## For future agent heading. Those get matched literally by the hooks and scripts, so my assumption was that they have to stay put.

I tried setting it up myself and got stuck on a few points where I couldn't tell where the project stands, so I'm asking here rather than opening an issue.

What I tried

I added a "Note language" section to my vault's _CLAUDE.md and wrote a test note in Italian.

• The validator accepted accented letters and ASCII apostrophes.
• It flagged the typographic apostrophe U+2019, and it flagged a translated preamble heading.

So it mostly worked. I still reverted to English in the end, for the reasons below.

Where I got stuck

.vault-config.json seems to recognize only exclude-dirs, exclude-paths, exclude-link-scan, rewrite_policy and source_policy, and to silently drop anything else. That leaves _CLAUDE.md as the only place to say "this vault writes in Italian", and an /obsidian-init rerun regenerates that file.

Is there an intended way to make a choice like that persistent, that I've missed?

2. The "plain English" rule

references/ai-first-rules.md:15 and references/claude-md-template.md:40 both ask for a preamble in plain English. With my customization in place the two instructions contradict each other on every write, which is not a great place to be. Is that line a deliberate call about retrieval quality, or just the default case nobody had reason to revisit?

3. Check 5 and Latin-script punctuation

Check 5 has the CJK punctuation exception from #271, which makes sense to me. Italian, French and Catalan legitimately produce U+2019 too, though (l'idea, dell'app), and there the check reads ordinary typography as a substitution. The only escape I found is AI_FIRST_SKIP_CHECKS=5, which turns the whole check off, including the em-dash and curly-quote cases I actually want caught.

Would something along the lines of the CJK exception make sense for Latin-script languages, or is the case too different to treat the same way?

4. Retrieval cost

A quick measurement on my own vault, on natural-language queries:

Note language	top-1
English	7/7
Italian	6/7

Small sample, but it's the main reason I reverted. The README covers the multilingual model's gains for non-English queries against English notes. I couldn't find the inverse case documented: non-English notes in a vault whose scaffolding, commands and index all stay English. Do you have a sense of what that costs in practice?

The two questions behind all of this

1. Is a mixed vault like this a shape you'd want to support, or is English a deliberate constraint?
2. If it is workable, should the language stop at note bodies, or could it reach template headings and section titles as well? I'd guess that's the expensive part, given the literal matching.

[eugeniughelbur]

Thanks for the careful write-up and the measurements — useful signal.

Here is what the repo says today (docs + hook), without deciding product direction for you:

What already works / is documented

• Accented Latin letters in note bodies are fine. Check 5 bans substitution punctuation (em dash, curly quotes, typographic apostrophe U+2019, etc.), not the alphabet. That matches what you saw.
• The only language carve-out on check 5 today is the CJK line exception from #271 / references/ai-first-rules.md (Common Anti-Patterns): on a line that contains CJK text, dashes/quotes/ellipsis are allowed. There is no Latin-script equivalent for Italian/French/Catalan U+2019 yet. AI_FIRST_SKIP_CHECKS=5 is the blunt escape you found; it turns the whole check off.
• Scaffolding that hooks and scripts match literally (frontmatter keys, ## For future agent, template headings, folder/file names, Kanban columns) is English by design in the shipped templates. Translating those headings is expected to fail validation today.
• Rule 2 in references/ai-first-rules.md and the _CLAUDE.md template both ask for the preamble in plain English. That is why a note-language customization in _CLAUDE.md fights the rule on every write.
• .vault-config.json is a small allowlist (exclude-dirs / exclude-paths / exclude-link-scan / rewrite_policy / source_policy). Unknown keys are ignored. There is no documented note_language (or similar) key, and /obsidian-init regenerating _CLAUDE.md will overwrite a hand-edited language section unless you re-apply it.
• README "multilingual" today means trigger phrases (EN/ES/PT/ZH) and a multilingual embedding model that improves non-English queries against English notes (scripts/eval/BASELINE.md). The inverse case — non-English note bodies with English scaffolding — is not documented with numbers.

What needs an owner call (I will not invent policy here)

1. Is a mixed vault (Italian bodies, English scaffolding) a shape you want to support, or is English-bodied notes a deliberate constraint?
2. If bodies may be Italian, should check 5 gain a Latin-script typographic-apostrophe allowance (narrower than skipping the whole check), and should Rule 2's "plain English" preamble be relaxed or made vault-configurable?
3. Should language preference live somewhere durable (e.g. a .vault-config.json key that /obsidian-init preserves), rather than only in _CLAUDE.md?

Until those land, the safest path that matches current rules is the one you already took: English scaffolding + English preamble, ASCII ' in Italian contractions if you keep Italian prose, and treat language preference as a product question rather than a local _CLAUDE.md override.

Happy to turn (2)/(3) into a tracked issue once the owner picks a direction.

[andreanovix]

Thanks for the thorough answer, it made the trade-offs much clearer.

A quick follow-up on where I landed, in case it's useful to other non-English speakers. In the end I went the other way: instead of writing note bodies in Italian, I keep the whole vault in English and have Claude translate whatever I say in Italian at write time. I talk to it in Italian, it replies in Italian, but every note it writes is English.

This sidesteps every point I raised:

• Rule 2 and the plain English preamble are satisfied, so there is no contradiction on every write.
• Check 5 never sees a U+2019 from Italian contractions, so no need for a Latin-script exception or AI_FIRST_SKIP_CHECKS=5.
• Retrieval stays on the 7/7 English baseline, and queries are issued in English too.
• Persistence: I put the rule in <vault>/.claude/CLAUDE.md rather than _CLAUDE.md. Per commands/obsidian-init.md step 10, when that file already has other content init only adds the @../_CLAUDE.md import and leaves the rest alone, so an /obsidian-init rerun doesn't wipe it.

This is the file:

# Vault operating manual

The manual lives at the vault root so every agent surface can find it.
This import loads it in full for Claude Code sessions started here.

@../_CLAUDE.md

## Language

- Write every vault note in English, following the plugin's standard rules.
- When I give you content in Italian to save (with /obsidian-save, /obsidian-capture, /obsidian-ingest or any other write), translate it into English before writing the note. Preserve meaning and detail; do not summarize unless I ask.
- Direct quotes and verbatim source excerpts stay in the original Italian inside quotation marks, followed by an English translation in parentheses.
- Italian terms with no exact English equivalent (institutions, legal or tax terms, names, idioms) stay in Italian, followed by a short English explanation in parentheses the first time they appear.
- If a raw/ folder exists or gets created by /obsidian-ingest, the source files in it stay in their original language. Only the notes derived from them are written in English.
- When searching the vault (obsidian_search, /obsidian-find or any search), write the queries in English, even when my question is in Italian.
- Always reply to me in Italian.

So far it holds up both in Claude Code and over the MCP server from Claude Desktop.

From my side there is nothing left to ask for.
If you think this translate-at-write pattern is the recommended path for non-English users, it might be worth a short mention in the docs.

[eugeniughelbur]

Thanks for closing the loop with the pattern that actually held up for you.

What you landed — talk Italian, write English notes, keep the rule in <vault>/.claude/CLAUDE.md so /obsidian-init does not wipe it — is a clean workaround that stays inside today's rules (plain-English preamble, check 5, English retrieval baseline).

Whether that translate-at-write path should be documented as the recommended route for non-English speakers is still an owner call. I will not invent that policy in the docs from here. If the owner says yes, a short README / FAQ note pointing at .claude/CLAUDE.md (not _CLAUDE.md) would be the natural place.

Glad it is working for you on both Claude Code and the MCP server.

[andreanovix]

I've renamed this discussion so it's easier to find for other non-English speakers.