Clarification on formal vs informal addressing

Yellow-Dog-Man / Locale

Locale files for Resonite

MIT License

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Clarification on formal vs informal addressing #6

Open atakiya opened 1 year ago

atakiya commented 1 year ago

Which way of addressing people should be used for languages containing formal and informal ways to address a person in this application?

For example German has the more informal "Du" to address singular "You", while the formal way would use "Sie". (For German) The informal way would usually be preferred in a younger audience and gaming, while professional areas still use the formal way - although this seems to slowly be fading as well now.

Alternatively, an alternate language could also be added to cover both usecases, as some people also would prefer one over the other.

ProbablePrime commented 1 year ago

@jackthefoxotter helped us make most of the translations in German so I want to tag them to bring them to the conversation.

Psychpsyo commented 1 year ago

The German one currently uses the formal version and I remember seeing somewhere that that was an intentional decision since Resonite (back then Neos) could also be used in professional contexts.

JackTheFoxOtter commented 1 year ago

Basically the current plan - at least for the German version - is the following:

Since there is no solution that satisfies everyone, we'll split the locale into two files: de.json -> Informal Version de-formal.json -> Formal Version

Currently, de.json is (after my currently pending PR) the most up-to-date version we have, 100% formal. Soon, we'll have two versions! But I'm not doing that today.

atakiya commented 1 year ago

Basically the current plan - at least for the German version - is the following:

Since there is no solution that satisfies everyone, we'll split the locale into two files: de.json -> Informal Version de-formal.json -> Formal Version

Currently, de.json is (after my currently pending PR) the most up-to-date version we have, 100% formal. Soon, we'll have two versions! But I'm not doing that today.

Question is just if the locale implementation supports that on the app-side, as it currently seemingly uses locale tags, like de or zh-ch

JackTheFoxOtter commented 1 year ago

That why I'm waiting to talk to @Frooxius about this before doing it. I would assume it should be possible tho, as en-gb.json does the same, only listing the keys that are different and "inheriting" the rest from en.json

JackTheFoxOtter commented 1 year ago

Small update on this - tested it with some examples - this works. Following IETF Language Standard (as Psychpsyo pointed out to me), the correct name for the overload file would be de-x-formal.json. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IETF_language_tag)

For the German locale this would mean we'll end up with two files:

de.json -> All German locale strings, direct addressing is done the informal way ("Du")
de-x-formal.json -> Only locale strings that contain direct addressing, using the formal way ("Sie")

This pretty much just works out of the box, the only thing that's missing would be the localized name of the language file in the settings menu. That should be "Deutsch (Formell)" for the German version, and "German (Formal)" for the international one. This will likely only make it into the game post-release, but Froox said it should be possible.

I already started a branch on my forked version of the repo, and will work on splitting the file up into two versions later today.