Spanish - translation of "you" - maybe informal better?

[shawna-slh]

Hi @cmuncharaz @daniel-montalvo @espinr @rumoroso and other Spanish speakers,

For German and French, there was general agreement to use the formal "you".

In the Spanish Glossary, we also said use formal you in Spanish.

I understand some think the informal would be better for the WAI resources you have been translating.

EOWG's perspective is that in WAI resources where we use "you", we are fairly informal. "You" is often not used in formal resources in English. We chose to use "you" in several resources to make them more "approachable" and feel directly relevant and actionable to readers.

I encourage you to consider the perspectives of Spanish-speaking people around the world.

If you all agree that it is best overall to use informal you in Spanish, that is just fine! We can change it in the Spanish Glossary.

Thanks for your thoughtful work on optimizing translation!

[daniel-montalvo]

Hello Shawn and all:

To continue discussion, please see the Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas )#4) where it is said for castellano that usted implies certain "distance, courtesy and formality". While this might be the approach for a standard or their surrounding documents, that might not be the case for introductory and outreach resources like those produced by EOWG.

It is true also that these considerations apply mainly to Castellano and that most of Latin American Spanish speakers (and some of the Andalucía region -- south of Spain), have the "usted" as their only second person pronoun, regardless of context.

So I guess we might need to decide whether these translations are from the point of view of our "castellano" backgroun (I assume most of us in this thread are castellano speakers) or we want to have a more international perspective.

[espinr]

Spanish is rather more complex. Indeed, depending on the region, 'you' may be: 'tú', 'usted' or 'vos'. In my opinion, I prefer the informal form of you for those EOWG's resources that are focused on informal communication, but using formal language in translation of specifications. More opinions?

[cmuncharaz]

As pointed out, the informal "you" (tú) would be fine to address many Spanish speakers from different countries, however there are some other countries where "vos" is used instead of "tú". There's even a minority that would expect the formal "you" (usted).

So, in my opinion, if we are to target a universal Spanish speaker, I would use the formal "you" to sound as much neutral as possible.