Italian website translation: tu, Lei and Swiss Italian

Italian addresses a stranger in the third person. The polite form, Lei, takes the same verb as she, so "do you have" becomes ha in place of the familiar hai, and a translation that mixes the two reads as if it changed who it was talking to halfway down the page. Picking tu or Lei is the decision that shapes an Italian version most; spelling and Swiss usage come after it.

LangRelay serves Italian under the tag it, at /it/, written as the Italian of Italy. You choose tu or Lei for the whole language in one setting.

Tu or Lei#

Italian has tu for one person you know, Lei for one person you address politely, and voi for several people. The Accademia della Crusca, answering the question in 2025, puts the rule as familiarity: where there is little or none, use lei.

The difference on a page is often a single letter, which is why mixed registers slip through review. Compare the reminder under a sign-in form:

• Tu: Hai dimenticato la password?
• Lei: Ha dimenticato la password?

Commands change more. The polite imperative borrows the subjunctive, so a newsletter prompt reads Iscriviti alla newsletter with tu and Si iscriva alla newsletter with Lei. A button can also use the infinitive, Iscriversi, which addresses nobody in particular; whichever pattern you choose, keep it on every button.

LangRelay's guidance is to use Lei where the reader may be a stranger to you, such as legal pages, banking and anything a business buyer reads, and tu only if your brand already speaks to Italian customers that way in its own copy. Once chosen, it has to hold in the checkout, the account pages and the emails.

The capital L is a choice#

You will see Lei written with a capital, and its possessives too, even when the pronoun is joined to a verb, as in the Crusca's example informarVi. The Crusca calls this capital of respect optional: it is used in letters, emails and official documents addressed to someone you call lei, and Italian grammar does not require it. LangRelay's guidance is to decide once whether your site writes Lei or lei and keep it on every page. When you ask Relay for a review, it can report capitalization as a minor finding, and you fix the line in the Translation grid.

Accents: è, é and E'#

Italian marks a stressed final vowel with an accent, and the direction of the accent matters: è (is) takes a grave accent, while perché and poiché take an acute one. The Crusca's language service has written about two habits that come from keyboards. Accented capitals have no key, so people type E' for È, and accents typed from memory drift into forms such as perchè.

Neither belongs on a website. Check that the Italian pages use È at the start of a sentence, and search them for perchè, poichè and the other wrong forms. Your brand names stay as they are in the source, which you can enforce by marking them Keep as source in LangRelay's glossary (paid plans).

Italy and Switzerland#

Italian is an official language of Switzerland, at federal level and in the cantons of Ticino and Graubünden. Swiss Italian uses the same grammar, but its vocabulary has calques from French and German. Wikipedia's article on Swiss Italian lists azione for a special offer, where Italy writes offerta speciale or promozione, natel for a mobile phone, and licenza di condurre where Italy says patente di guida.

Numbers and dates differ too. JavaScript's Intl.NumberFormat and Intl.DateTimeFormat, which read the Unicode CLDR data, give these:

CLDR's data for Italian as written in Italy leaves a four-digit amount without a thousands separator and groups from five digits (its minimum grouping rule), and Swiss usage swaps the decimal comma for a point and groups with an apostrophe.

A worked example: one offer, two markets#

This is a worked example. A Zurich shop that sells in Italy and Ticino runs one autumn promotion. On the Italian page for Italy, its banner says Offerta speciale and shows 1234,50 €. On a page for Ticino, the same banner would say Azione and show CHF 1234.50, and its returns page would cite Swiss law. When this much of the page differs, a separate Swiss Italian version is worth the extra review.

In LangRelay's locale model that version is it-CH, a Target locale of its own with an /it-ch/ prefix, its own hreflang entry and its own approvals. Today a Site offers bare it; Swiss Italian is on the roadmap. Bare it stays the version for Italian readers everywhere else, and Google asks that every version list itself and all the others in its hreflang set.

Setting the register for Italian#

The bare tag it means Italian as written in Italy, the Unicode CLDR default content for it, and LangRelay asks its translation engine for Italian (Italy) by name. Under Settings, Languages, the Formality register for Italian has three values: Formal for Lei, Informal for tu, and Language default, which leaves it to the engine. The value you save applies to machine translations started after it. Lines that already have a translation keep it, also on new pages that reuse them, until you select them in the Translation grid and choose Machine retranslate. If a page ends up with both hai and ha, a Relay review reports the line whose register differs from the rest as a minor finding.

The WordPress translation guide covers installing the plugin. Spanish website translation and German website translation cover the same register choice in two more languages, and the locale entry explains tags such as it-CH. To see Italian on your own Site, book a demo.