diff --git a/docs/decisions.md b/docs/decisions.md
index 4c13a42..d5e190f 100644
--- a/docs/decisions.md
+++ b/docs/decisions.md
@@ -402,3 +402,23 @@ needs a Query over some other field, not this; and membership now depends on the
 ADR-0008 makes permanent, so re-parenting a chapter is a permalink event with an alias.
 Revisit if: a real collection must span sections. Then it is a declared taxonomy (ADR-0032's second
 half), not a change to how a series is joined.
+
+## ADR-0034 — Chrome text is the engine's; body text is the author's
+Date: 2026-07-30 · Status: accepted
+Decision: every word the engine puts on a page that the author did not write — labels, page counts,
+month names, digits — comes from a table in the engine keyed by (key, language), reached from templates
+through `t`, `num` and `day`, so no template hardcodes English. Authored body text is never localised and
+never rewritten beyond typographic smoothing, which is goldmark's typographer: quotes, dashes, ellipses,
+code spans untouched. Machine-readable output — `datetime`, URLs, anything a parser reads — stays ASCII
+whatever the locale.
+Why: a Bengali page that says "Page 2 of 3" in English is broken, and a theme cannot fix it without
+hardcoding the very strings a theme must not own (theme-contract.md). Meanwhile the opposite mistake is
+worse: localising body text means the engine editing prose, and Bengali numerals inside an author's
+sentence are the author's decision, not the renderer's. So the line is drawn by *who wrote the words*.
+Consequence: cheap — a new label is one table row with both languages beside each other, and a missing
+translation falls back to the default locale and then to the key, so it can never blank a page or fail a
+render. Expensive — the engine now carries human-language strings, which is a small localisation surface
+that grows with the theme; a site root cannot yet add or override a key, so a theme needing its own words
+must write them in its own block.
+Revisit if: a site root needs its own chrome strings. That is the settings cascade's problem
+(`ideas/deferred-decisions.md`), not a second table.