Spanish website translation: tú, usted and hreflang

Before a single page goes into Spanish, settle two questions: which Spanish your pages are written in, and whether they address the reader as tú or usted. The first decides the language tag in your URLs and hreflang. The second decides the grammar of every sentence that speaks to the reader, from a form error to an order email. In LangRelay, Spanish is the tag es, served under /es/, written as the Spanish of Spain, and its register is a setting you choose per language.

Which Spanish does es stand for?#

A bare language tag says nothing about the country, so every translation system has to pick a variety for it. LangRelay follows the Unicode CLDR rule that each bare tag has a default content locale, and for es that locale is Spain. So when you add Spanish to a Site, the machine translation is asked for Spanish as written in Spain, and the page is labelled es.

In hreflang, es means "Spanish speakers anywhere", so your /es/ pages are the version Google can show to readers in Madrid, Mexico City and Buenos Aires alike. For most sites that is the right first step: one Spanish version that every Spanish reader understands.

Regional Spanish versions are part of LangRelay's locale model. A tag such as es-MX would be its own Target locale, with its own URL prefix (/es-mx/), its own hreflang entry and its own approvals, living beside bare es. Only the bare tag is offered today; the regional ones are on the roadmap.

Why there is no es-419 page#

RFC 5646 defines es-419 as Spanish for Latin America and the Caribbean, using a region code from the UN's list. It is a valid language tag. Google's documentation for localized versions says the opposite about hreflang: only ISO 639-1 language codes and ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 region codes are supported, and it names es-419 as an example of a code that is not. A page meant for Latin American readers therefore needs either bare es or one tag per country, such as es-MX and es-AR.

Tú or usted#

Spanish marks the register in pronouns, possessives and verb endings, so the choice shows up in almost every sentence that speaks to the reader. LangRelay treats it as a brand decision. Its guidance is that tú suits most consumer copy written for Spain, while usted suits public-sector sites, financial services and much copy written for Latin America.

Two more differences catch out teams that pick a register and stop there. The plural "you" is vosotros mainly in Spain, while other countries use ustedes whatever the level of formality. And in Argentina, Uruguay, much of Central America and several other regions, the everyday informal pronoun is vos rather than tú. LangRelay's register setting offers formal (usted) and informal (tú). It has no vos option, so a site written in Argentine voseo needs a person to edit the copy.

A worked example: one cart screen in both registers#

This is an invented example, a short cart page translated twice from the same English source, once with the register set to Informal and once to Formal.

Every row changes, including the two whose English never says "you" or "your", because each one speaks to the shopper. Those are the lines a change of register touches, so settle it before translation starts. Buttons can sidestep it: WooCommerce's own Spanish translation writes "Añadir al carrito" and "Ver carrito", infinitives with no tú or usted in them, and "Seguir comprando" where the table above has Sigue or Siga.

The register does not settle vocabulary. "Carrito" is common across the Spanish-speaking world, but many product words differ by country, and a Mexican shopper and a Spanish one may expect different terms for the same item. That is a variant question, answered by the tag and by a reviewer who knows the market.

The hreflang values for a Spanish site#

Say your site is in English at example.com and you add Spanish. A translated pricing page served by LangRelay's WordPress plugin carries these links in its head, and the English page carries the same three:

<html lang="es">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/pricing/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="https://example.com/es/pricing/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/pricing/" />

Google asks for exactly this shape: each language version lists itself and every other version, and links that are not returned are ignored. x-default names the page for readers whose language matches none of the versions, which here is the English original.

When regional variants arrive, a Mexican version would add a fourth line with hreflang="es-MX" pointing at /es-mx/pricing/, and bare es would stay as the catch-all for every other Spanish reader. The tag is the only identity a Target locale has, so the URL prefix, the hreflang value and html lang can never disagree.

Setting up Spanish in LangRelay#

Spanish is one of the nine languages a Site can use, as its source or as a Target locale. Once it is added, a person who can configure the Site opens Settings, Languages and picks one of three values for its Formality register:

• Language default leaves the register to the translation engine's natural choice for website copy.
• Formal asks every new machine translation to address the reader as usted.
• Informal asks for tú.

Register belongs to how your Site sounds in Spanish, so it never appears in a tag, a URL or hreflang. Changing it affects machine translations started afterwards. Approved Spanish text keeps the usted or tú it was written in until someone selects it in the Translation grid and chooses Machine retranslate; LangRelay never rewrites published pages on its own. When Relay reviews a page, a line in a different register from the rest of that page comes back as a minor finding.

On paid plans a per-language glossary sits beside the register: product names to keep as written, and terms that must always get one Spanish rendering. 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.

Checks before your Spanish pages go live#

• Questions and exclamations open with ¿ and ¡. Check that short labels and buttons kept them.
• Read the error messages, the empty states and the order emails as well as the home page, in the same register.
• Spanish labels are often longer than their English source, so look at buttons and menus on a phone.
• Set prices, dates and units for the countries you sell to; the website localization guide covers those.
• View the source of one translated page and confirm lang="es" and the hreflang set above. LangRelay's delivery check reads the same tags after each activation.

The multilingual website guide covers the decisions that come before choosing a language, and the hreflang guide covers the tags in more depth. French and German raise the same questions with their own answers: see French website translation and German website translation. To see the register setting on your own site, book a demo.