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Re: Article on Debian Women



On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 07:52:10AM +0100, Christian Perrier wrote:
> The problem of second person in English in also translation. We all
> know that the use in each language is very different about that
> (du/Sie in german, tu/usted in Spanish, tu/vous in French). Depending
> on the country, the second singular person may sound as very
> familiar...or just not too informal : I would for instance never use
> "tu" in French documentation and man pages while it seems that this is
> not a big problem for other languages.

> So, avoiding second person in English is also a way to help
> translators not having headaches...

AMA, this is still something that should be handled by translation
guidelines for each individual translation team -- because each language
*is* different, and use of second person in English is acceptable.  I would
even say it's strongly preferred for contexts such as debconf templates.

-- 
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer

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