translate: never emit a terminal punctuation mark in an intent template; refuse one in validation #692

🤖 Auto-generated by Claude Opus (claude-opus-5) via Claude Code — NOT human-reviewed. Verify before acting.

Observed

300 fa-IR .intent template lines across 10 ovos-skill-* repositories end in
؟, the Arabic question mark. The en-US templates they come from carry no
terminal mark. A translator adds the mark because the line reads as a question,
and the app shipped the result.

The same thing is in de-DE and ru-RU, and in en-US in ovos-skill-parrot, so
the rule is not about Farsi.

Correction to the first version of this issue

The first version of this text said the mark makes the template match nothing a
speaker says, measured against a bare padacioso.IntentContainer. That
measurement was against the wrong thing and the claim was wrong. The
end-to-end result in ovos-skill-parrot, which holds 7 fa-IR golden rows whose
utterance also carries the mark, on padacioso 2.4.3a1 and ovos-core 2.2.4a1:

The pipeline folds the mark away above padacioso. Nothing is broken today.

Expected

A translated .intent template carries no terminal punctuation mark, whatever
the script, because the reference line has none and speech to text produces
none. ؟, ?, 。, । and a trailing . or ! are the same case.

1. tools/translate_locale.py, and whatever the app runs in its place: strip a
   terminal punctuation mark from each translated option before it is written.
   The reference line has none, so there is nothing to preserve.
2. The validation layer: report a .intent line that ends in a punctuation
   mark, in any locale. A warning, not a refusal, since nothing is broken
   today: the value is one spelling across the fleet, and a line that no longer
   depends on a fold that may change.

The second point is worth less than the first version of this issue claimed.
Treat it as hygiene with a measured basis, not as a defect to chase.

Reproduce

git clone https://github.com/OpenVoiceOS/ovos-skill-weather
cd ovos-skill-weather && git checkout dev
grep -rc '؟$' locale/fa-IR/intents/
grep -rc '?$' locale/en-US/intents/

fa-IR reports 171 such lines over 9 files; en-US reports 0.

Where

The translation step and the validation layer. The 10 hand-done pull requests
are OpenVoiceOS/ovos-skill-weather#308, ovos-skill-date-time#450,
ovos-skill-diagnostics#85, ovos-skill-parrot#177,
ovos-skill-boot-finished#121, ovos-skill-confucius-quotes#102,
ovos-skill-laugh#134, ovos-skill-alerts#386, ovos-skill-fuster-quotes#81 and
ovos-skill-color-picker#86. Each one is the mark removed and nothing else.