[Owncloud] Translation to German: 2 Questions

[Georgi Stanojevski]

On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 9:26 PM, Florian Rüchel
<florian.ruechel at googlemail.com> wrote:

> The first being whether we should talk to people in the formal "Sie" or
> the informal "Du" in German? As a third option one might consider two
> languages but that might also be a bit too much.
> For those of you not familiar with the distinction between the two
> salutations: You would a address your friends with "Du" and your
> business partners and strangers with "Sie", both meaning "you".

I use the formal form (Вие == Sie) in the Macedonian translation. All
software translations in Macedonian that I know of KDE, Firefox,
LibreOffice, Gnome, Windows 7 use the formal form, so I guess that is
the convention.

The rule of thumb is that the machine doesn't know the user and should
use the formal form when it addresses the user.

But when the user tells the software what to do, as in Files->Upload,
than the verb form should be imperative which in Macedonian is the
same as the familiar (ти-du) form. This makes problems during the
translation when the string is not clear if it is the software
adressing the user or the user commanding the software.

Serbian, Croatian and Bulgarian translations of ownCloud also use the
formal form, but they are all slavic languages maybe German is
different. Prehaps you could check other projects to see how is the
translation there?

-- 
Glisha