Why we say Research Centres, not Research Centers
A one-minute note on why we pick UK spelling across the platforms — and where we make exceptions.
You'll notice we always write Research Centres, not Research Centers. Same with centralised, organisation, pharmacovigilance (not pharmacovigilance — same word, just checking you're awake).
This is deliberate. South Africa's official language variants default to UK English. Most of the regulatory documents we work with — SAHPRA guidelines, ICH-GCP as adopted, EU Annex 11, SAMRC publications — use UK spelling as their house style.
We keep the platforms consistent with that. Every user-visible string in Kronus, Nukleus and SafetyBase uses UK spelling. Product-page copy on this site does too. So do the case letters SafetyBase generates.
Where we deviate
Two exceptions.
Third-party regulatory names. The FDA is the US Food and Drug Administration, not the Federal…. That's the FDA's own house style. Same for US 21 CFR Part 11 — the "US" and "21 CFR" bits travel with the source. We follow whatever the issuing body uses.
Technical identifiers. Code, URL slugs, database column names —
all lowercase-and-underscored, and we're not going to litigate en-US
vs en-GB for a variable name. It doesn't reach a human.
Why bother writing about it
Consistency across regulated software matters more than you'd think. An auditor reading a case letter that says "centre" in one place and "center" in another has to check whether that's two different fields or one field that changed convention. Small things. But small things compound in a compliance context.
If you catch us slipping — a stray "-ize" ending or a phantom "e" where none belongs — flag it. We'll fix it.
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