Consistency between informal you (“du”) and formal you (“Sie”) in German Starlight docs

[randomguy-2650]

What is your idea?

Replace all uses of the formal you with the informal variant or vice versa.

Why is this important?

It wouldn’t help anyone, but it would make the German Starlight docs more consistent.

How does your idea relate to existing docs content?

No response

Participation

• I am willing to submit a pull request for this feature.

[randomguy-2650]

I’d assume that if the Starlight landing page uses the informal variant, all pages should use du, but not really sure.

[HiDeoo]

Thanks for the feedback 🙌

Just including @trueberryless to this discussion which is our most frequent German-language contributor.

[trueberryless]

Thanks for the ping HiDeoo 🙌

And thank you very much @randomguy-2650 for opening a dedicated discussion for this topic. As a German native-speaker I agree that this is very important to have consistent across all of Starlight's documentation 👍

I generally translated all of Starlight's docs into German with the informal form ("du") instead of the formal form ("Sie"), so generally I would say this is what we should aim for. This also makes the docs feel more personal and encourages the user to follow instructions + I think German users are then also more willing to interact with the awesome Astro community.

As far as I know, I don't know of any occurrences of the formal form ("Sie"), but I assume you found some places where it unintentionally was translated that way. My suggestion therefore would either be to create a PR every time one of us stumbles upon one formal form to correct the sentence structure or (the one I am a little bit opposed to because there is the likely possibility that we might miss some rare occurrences) go through the entire docs and correct every occurrence at once. In my opinion the second option is a very tedious task, as the whole docs already exists and you would either need to manually go through all the translations again (which I assume feels exhausting) or have a really good RegEx search query 😅

So my question now is: Do you have some kind of list of the wrong occurrences (formal form) that made you open this issue or have you just noticed it once or twice and thought about opening the discussion?

I honestly would be really grateful if you create a PR with all the corrections if you have such a list and ping me for a review in there. If not, as I said, continuously improving step-by-step when noticing an occurrence by accident feels like the way to go. But of course, you are free to do some global search of the German translation if you want to. That would also be super welcome 🤗

[randomguy-2650]

I just used the Starlight search in the German locale for “Sie”, “Ihnen” and other words that indicate formality. Some results are focusing on the lowercase variants, which aren’t formal, just a different pronoun.

[randomguy-2650]

I found some in the Astro Docs here, I would assume the informal variant would be used here as well.

Not marked in the screenshot, but also one under it.

PR fix: withastro/docs#12390

[trueberryless]

Actually, in these specific cases, I think "Sie" is definitely the correct form, as it is not a reference to the reader but rather a pronoun to the "Astro-Seiten" in the sentence before the bullet list. It's rather confusing here a bit, as the sentence also starts with this pronoun so it starts with a capital letter 😅

I have to admit, I stopped actively trying to translate the Astro docs into German because of the sheer amount of pages untranslated or outdated. So I can't guarentee that there are no inconsistencies in the Astro docs, but Starlight should 99% be good. But as I said, if you find anything, just open the PR like you did, it feels awesome to have additional eyes aiming for perfection 🙌

[randomguy-2650]

Since many programming terms are in English anyways, many German developers would probably read the English docs anyways, as it is the most up to date version.

[trueberryless]

I can only speak for Starlight, but here the German translations are like 90% of the time completely up-to-date (same as French and Korean) because we have motivated people which put much work into keeping the translation up-to-date. This counts for all languages. Technical terms sometimes do not get translated, sometimes the do, depending on if the German term is a common technical term or not.

So I think that the German translation is valid and we should not neglect the translation. Moreover, we should try to aim for quality and consistent documentation.

Nonetheless, it sounds like you suggest that we close this discussion as complete as there are no known occurrences of the formal form ("Sie"). So from my side, this issue is resolved and as German translators we keep in mind to use the informal form. This is also already noted in the German guidelines: https://github.com/withastro/docs/blob/main/i18n-guides%2Fdeutsch.md#L61 👍