objectui: dashboard KPI cards drop the translated widget title/description — the self-contained metric path bypasses tWidgetTitle, and the plugin's private resolveLabel never calls t() #5428

Found while re-locating objectstack#5407's item 3. That item's stated premise (dashboard chips / KPI sub-captions are "console-supplied chrome that no app bundle key reaches") does not hold — both strings come from app metadata — but the measurement turned up a real renderer defect underneath, filed here.

1. resolveLabel accepts the I18nLabel shape and then ignores it

Three private copies in packages/plugin-dashboard/src:

• MetricCard.tsx line 15
• MetricWidget.tsx line 118
• DashboardRenderer.tsx line 92

all read string | { key?, defaultValue? } and all end with return label.defaultValue || label.key; — the key is never handed to t(). Compare packages/layout/src/NavigationRenderer.tsx line 260, whose resolveLabel takes a t and does translate.

So a dashboard author who writes the documented localized-label object gets the English defaultValue in every locale. The escape hatch is declared but inert: exactly the "declared = enforced" gap that makes AI-authored metadata quietly wrong.

2. A self-contained metric widget never sees the translated title/description at all

DashboardRenderer.tsx:

• line ~653: const isSelfContained = widget.type === 'metric' && !datasetBound;
• lines 654-655 compute resolvedTitle / resolvedDescription via tWidgetTitle / tWidgetDescription (the working {ns}.dashboards.{dash}.widgets.{id}.title|description convention)
• but the self-contained branch renders no Card header, so neither value is used
• meanwhile line ~525, inside the metric dispatch, builds the card's own label with the untranslated resolveLabel(widget.title) || widgetType, and spreads ...options (carrying options.description) straight through

Net effect: a type: 'metric' KPI card shows the raw authored English while every other widget type on the same dashboard shows the translated header. That is precisely the "widget titles/descriptions translate fine, which is what makes the mismatch conspicuous" observation in objectstack#5407.

Open design question — please decide before implementing

options.description (the metric card's sub-caption) is a different authored field from widget.description (the shared card header's). Routing the former through widgetDescription(dashName, widget.id, fallback) would give it the same convention key as the latter. For a self-contained metric that collides with nothing today, because widget.description is never rendered on that path — but it does conflate two authored fields under one key. Alternatives: give the sub-caption its own convention segment, or make the self-contained metric render the shared header like everything else. Worth settling deliberately rather than in a patch.

Not in scope here

The Owner: / Lead Source: chip prefix in DashboardFilterBar.tsx (line 226, def.label || def.name) is app metadata — DashboardFilterDef.label in packages/core/src/utils/dashboard-filters.ts is a plain string, with no I18nLabel form and no convention resolution. Whether the filter bar should resolve it through useSafeFieldLabel (as DatasetWidget already does for measure headers) is a separate contract question; the filter def carries no object name to key on, so it cannot simply copy that call.