Muchos gracias!

Fragment of a discussion from User talk:Fitoschido

Hi Koavf. Don’t mention it, we’re all collaborating to translate after all :-).

About your question on tuteo vs. voseo: Historically, MediaWiki Spanish translators had a consensus favoring the use of as it is the most widely used form across Spain and Latin America. There are, of course, countries such as Argentina, Uruguay and Nicaragua (and some parts of Southern Mexico as well) where people use vos for familiar treatment (there are slight variation in this usage across dialects AFAIK); if you want to translate for one of these countries specifically, the translation should have the locale specified (e.g. es_AR or es_NI, etc.)

¡Gracias a ti por tus contribuciones! Saludos.

Fito (talk)20:19, 19 June 2014

Fito: Creo que tu ingles es mejor que mi español. So I will use English. Do you know if voseo-using Hispanics understand tuteo?

User:Koavf ([[User talk::Koavf|d]]) (en-N/en-US, es-2/es-US)05:43, 21 June 2014

I would say they all understand tuteo, although they may find it awkward to use in casual speech. A safe bet is to use formal Spanish for any locale (i.e., using usted). In fact, this is historically the standard treatment in software localization into Spanish, but MediaWiki (and web sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Google apps) deviate the norm ;).

Fito (talk)17:39, 22 June 2014

I know why I prefer tú but why not use "usted" all the time? It seems a safe bet and there's no chance of being unintelligible or offending someone. For what it's worth, I would find voseo confusing (I can never remember how it's conjugated). Would Hispanics from tuteo societies be confused by voseo?

Koavf (d) (en-N/en-US, es-2/es-US)17:42, 22 June 2014

Well, there are also these localizers who find usted too formal, and there are companies who require localizers to use casual language so that their products seem more… “approachable” by consumers (Microsoft comes to my mind right now – they’ve required Windows Phone translators to use tuteo and simple language, at least in es_MX).

In a nutshell, there is no single solution for this whole mess that is Spanish. :P

As you guessed it, people unfamiliar with voseo may get confused. I don’t know how to conjugate it perfectly either, because it is not uniform across regions, let alone countries; and we use tuteo where I live.

To conclude, I think you can just use tuteo for a start and it’ll be okay. If the intended audience of the translated product finds it inappropriate (because, for example, they are all mature adults or seniors), it can be changed to usted.

Fito (talk)17:53, 22 June 2014