Re: [PATCH] l10n: de.po: translate 265 new messages

From: Ralf Thielow <ralf.thielow@googlemail.com>
Date: May 21, 2012, 18:02 UTC
Message-ID: <CAN0XMOKsKRwsrHv=FNKtzydf8_sW6nM7bw2HJu6wT4reR=jujg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <1825828.hnjW9vybBO@cs-pc>

Show 17 quoted lines

>
> The translation (both in the existing strings and in your newly added ones)
> addresses the user as "du" instead of "Sie" (for the non-German-speaking: "du"
> is the informal addressing, "Sie" is the formal addressing). However, in
> German software there are two main rules on this: 1. Don't address the user
> directly. Rather prefer passive forms over directly addressing the person. I
> know English software is much more permissive of this one. Hence, occasionally
> the German translator should take the freedom to change the wording so that
> the addressing of the user is replaced in the translation by some passive
> wording without the addressing of the user. 2. If the addressing of the user
> is unavoidable, the text should use "Sie" instead of "du". Addressing the user
> as "du" should be constrained to audiences which for sure always address each
> other as "du", such as certain educational settings and/or games and such (and
> maybe in the Ikea-Katalog, but even there they switched from Du to Sie and
> back again several times). Please try to avoid using "du" in developer tools'
> user-visible strings. Thanks a lot!
>

Hi Christian,

thanks for your review. I agree with you that using a formal addressing is better and probably sounds a bit more serious than an informal. However, I would put that change in another commit to make it through the whole translation, because it's probably not a good idea to mix them. This also includes the last git.pot update on master. I don't expect big updates on git.pot after 1.7.11-rc0 was tagged, so afterwards I start working on this.

Thanks

Ralf