🌍English, Hebrew and Yiddish

English is where the explaining happens. It is the language of the person who did not grow up with this, or grew up with it and was never quite corrected, and who needs a thing said plainly once without being made to feel like a beginner for asking.

It is also, practically, the language most of the world reaches Lechem in — a stranger searching for what a bracha is, a parent looking for something for the house, a person who wants to know whether an app like this respects Shabbos before they install it.

So the English is written to be read cold, by somebody with no background at all, without ever talking down. Where a word has no English — bracha, zman, shiur, minhag — it stays in the Hebrew and gets explained the first time, because replacing it with an approximation is a small lie repeated forever.

Hebrew is not a translation target in Lechem. It is what the seforim are in. Every bracha, every tefillah, every possuk in the app is Hebrew before it is anything else, and the app's whole typographic effort goes into making those letters readable — large, clean, pointed, with enough air to follow a line at arm's length in a shul.

That effort has a rule behind it: every Hebrew letterform in Lechem comes from a real typeface, placed. No letter is ever drawn by hand or approximated in a graphic, because a hand-drawn Hebrew letter is a wrong letter. That applies to the app's own mark as much as to a page of text.

The Hebrew interface — the labels, the explanations, the buttons — is written in Hebrew, for a Hebrew reader, and it lays out right to left throughout. It is not the English with the words swapped.

Yiddish is here because for a great many of the people this is built for, it is simply the language of the house. Not a heritage feature and not a gesture — the language a person actually thinks in while deciding what bracha to make.

It is also the hardest of the three to get right, and the easiest to get wrong in a way that is obvious to a native reader and invisible to everyone else. A machine translation into Yiddish reads, to somebody who grew up with it, like a stranger doing an impression. It would undo more trust than the feature earns.

So the Yiddish in Lechem is written, never converted, and it is written in the register people speak — the everyday one, in the spelling this world actually uses, not an academic orthography nobody reads. The final judge of it is the owner's own ear, and nothing here is treated as settled until it has passed that.