German website translation: Sie, du, de-AT and de-CH

German is one language with three standard written forms. Germany, Austria and Switzerland each have their own, and German also asks you to choose between the formal Sie and the informal du whenever the page speaks to the reader. A German translation project that starts well settles both before translating anything: who the German pages are for, and how they address that reader.

In LangRelay, German is the tag de. It is served under /de/, written as the German of Germany, and carries a Formality register you set to Sie, du or the language default.

Germany, Austria and Switzerland#

German is pluricentric: Austrian German is a standardized form of the language in its own right, and so is Swiss Standard German. For a website the differences are small enough that a reader in Vienna or Zurich understands a page written in Berlin, and large enough that they notice where it was written.

Austria has its own words for everyday things. January is Jänner, where Germany writes Januar, and a tomato in Vienna and eastern Austria is a Paradeiser. So an Austrian date picker needs Jänner, and a Viennese grocer's site may want Paradeiser where a shop in Germany writes Tomaten.

Switzerland changes the spelling. Swiss Standard German replaces ß with ss, so a word Germany spells with ß is written with ss on a Swiss page. Its vocabulary differs too: a bicycle is a Velo, and a mobile phone can be a Natel. Prices in Swiss francs and Swiss legal wording usually matter more than any of these.

A separate version is worth it when something on the page has to differ by country: prices and currency, shipping and returns terms, legal text, or a brand that sells mostly in one of the three. A site that sells the same thing at the same price in all three can serve one German version to all of them.

How LangRelay labels German#

The bare tag de stands for German as written in Germany, because that is the Unicode CLDR default content locale for de. LangRelay asks its translation engine for that variety by name, so the engine is never left to pick one on its own.

LangRelay's locale model makes each regional German its own Target locale: de-AT would have its own /de-at/ prefix, hreflang entry, translations and approvals, beside bare de. Today a Site offers bare de; the Austrian and Swiss versions are on the roadmap.

A worked example: the hreflang set for one shop in three countries#

This is an invented example. A shop in English adds German for Germany, then Austrian and Swiss versions once those are available, because its Swiss prices are in francs. Its returns page would carry the same five lines on every version:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/returns/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://example.com/de/returns/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de-AT" href="https://example.com/de-at/returns/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de-CH" href="https://example.com/de-ch/returns/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/returns/" />

A German speaker in Austria gets the de-AT page and one in Switzerland the de-CH page. A German speaker in Germany, Belgium or Italy has no regional match and gets the bare de page, which is why the bare version stays even when regional ones exist. Everyone else gets x-default, the English original.

Google's rules make this work: a language code, optionally a region code, and each version listing itself and every other version. Leave one line out on one page and Google may ignore the pair, so the set has to be identical everywhere. LangRelay's WordPress plugin writes the set for each page from the same list of that page's live translations, so the versions agree.

Sie or du#

German shows the register in three places at once: the pronoun, the possessive and the verb. Duden's rule D 84 says the polite Sie and its possessive Ihr are always capitalized, and Ihnen, a form of Sie, follows it. Compare one newsletter line in each register:

• Formal: Melden Sie sich an und erhalten Sie Ihren Rabattcode per E-Mail.
• Informal: Melde dich an und erhalte deinen Rabattcode per E-Mail.

The formal line also comes out two words longer. LangRelay's guidance is to treat Sie as the conservative choice, the safe one for anything financial or official, and du as a choice for a consumer brand that wants to sound informal. Once a brand uses du it has to keep using it, down to error messages and the order confirmation.

WordPress has the same split. Its own German translation comes in two versions on translate.wordpress.org, the default one and a formal one, and site owners pick a locale for their admin and theme strings. WordPress locales follow the de_DE pattern of a language code and a country code joined by an underscore.

LangRelay keeps register apart from the locale. The rendered page is translated whatever locale WordPress itself runs in, the register is a setting on the German Target locale, and the page's hreflang and lang stay de either way. There is no tag for formal German that search engines understand, so making it a separate locale would leave two pages competing for the same hreflang="de".

Setting up German in LangRelay#

Add German under Settings, Languages, then choose its Formality register. Language default leaves it to the translation engine. Formal asks for Sie and Informal for du, in every machine translation started after the change. Pages translated before the change keep their wording, and so does text a new page shares with them, until someone selects it in the Translation grid and asks for a Machine retranslate. A page that ends up with both Sie and du is what a Relay review catches: each line in a different register from the rest of the page is a minor finding.

A German glossary helps too. Compound nouns make German product terms easy to translate three different ways, so fix the ones that matter, and mark your brand and plan names Keep as source. By default a translation goes live as soon as it is ready, and free checks hold a page with untranslated text, the wrong language or a changed price. To approve every page yourself, choose Ask me first.

Questions about German translations#

Does German text need more space?#

German compounds and longer phrasing often make labels wider than the English source. Check menus, buttons and table headers on a phone; to check before pages go live, choose Ask me first.

Should we write Sie with a capital in every case?#

Only when it means "you". The lowercase sie means "she" or "they", and getting the case wrong changes who the sentence is about.

The multilingual website guide covers the choices that come before picking languages, and the WordPress translation guide covers installing the plugin. The other pilot languages are in Spanish website translation and French website translation. To set up German on your own Site, book a demo.