I’ve recently been using PeerTube more and as such, been also paying more attention to the client’s localization (in my case, for European Portuguese).
I’ve noticed some blunders and areas for improvement (such as «min», as in «minute», being translated to «mínimo», aka «minimum»), and would like to contribute.
I’ve done quite a lot of localization work on FOSS projects, and I always start the same way: asking project owners what kind of language they’re looking for — formal or informal?
That isn’t much of a concern in English, but it is in Portuguese, so it’s important to get that right and apply it consistently on all strings.
Thank you!
PS: I couldn’t find a translation sub-tag for PeerTube. Apologies if the post is incorrectly tagged.
In Portuguese, formal and informal language differ in the choice of pronouns, verb conjugation and overall vocabulary.
On one hand, formal language assumes some distance from the other party (in this case, it would be user), often using words typically deemed more «correct». On the other hand, informal is closer to the user, often making more liberal use of certain expressions and punctuation marks (such as «!»).
The centerpieces of this difference is the «você»/«tu» (and auxiliary «lhe»/«te») for formal/informal, respectively. In English, this is all overloaded on «you».
There are some nuances in practice, such as using «você» to directly address someone being considered disrespectful in some contexts, or some more wacky differences between formal/informal conjugations.
In general, though, like what happens in English, it’s common practice to avoid directly addressing the user directly as «you» in interfaces, often dropping the pronoun altogether and rephrasing the message.
The choice of formal/informal greatly influences how an application feels to the users. A clear example might be comparing apps like Slack or MS Teams to something like Discord. While the former have a target audience much better served with formal language, Discord would absolutely miss the mark if it didn’t adopt informal language features.
Not all cases are this black and white, however, and I think the decision for PeerTube is not trivial. From what I gather as a user and from the main project page, you do want to feel welcoming and friendly, but at the same time, you don’t want to feel too amateurish by being overly close to the user. All in all, I’d say informal may be the best choice, but I’m not 100% positive on that.
This also highlights the importance of having distinct translations for European and Brazilian Portuguese, seeing as the words used for formal/informal vary between the variants (e.g. «você» is very commonly used as «tu» in casual conversations in pt-BR, but not in pt-PT, as stated above).
I hope this helps inform your decision, let me know if you want more insight
I don’t have a strong opinion on that matter. But I think I’m more included towards the formal form. But I trust the community and their culture to handle translations choice!
