Should translations be formal or informal?

[gergelypolonkai]

There are languages that differentiate between formal and informal communication, such as German or Hungarian. I’m planning to do a Hungarian translation of ProGit, and I’m not sure if it’s me to decide which one to use. (IT people usually use informal language, so I would cast my vote there.)

[ben]

So far you're the only one who's said anything about Hungarian, so you get to make the decision. Is there a precedent you can follow? Is there a convention from other technical books or software documentation that's in Hungarian? Which way do you think would be the most comfortable and useful for readers?

Either way, feel free to get started. We'd be happy to have your help.

[nobozo]

As a former linguist, I would suggest following the model used by the other languages that have a similar distinction (e.g. French and German), unless Hungarian has some special conventions I'm not aware of.

[jnavila]

FWIW, in French, we used the formal way. In a technical book, informal way is utterly inappropriate.

[gergelypolonkai]

In Hungarian, most technical books go around the problem, and convert every
instance of you into we (Hungarian formal language basically looks like
this with a very rough translation: Does you make your own food?, except
informal you is te and its formal version is ön; I hope you get the
idea). As far as I remember my childhood German classes, it's something
similar to their rules; linguists say that our formal language rules
actually come from German.

By using we instead of you, writers can pretty much evade the usage of
formal or informal language, while taking the risk that they must rephrase
a whole paragraph, like the one at the end of th first chapter, which gives
some statements referencing to the reader as »you«.
On 6 Nov 2014 09:06, "Jean-Noël Avila" notifications@github.com wrote:

FWIW, in French, we used the formal way. In a technical book, informal way
is utterly inappropriate.

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