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makeitdouble 5 hours ago

Using pronouns is most of the time the sign of an immature team/director/PO or building a service that is of extremely limited target.

Trying to be overly friendly and human to the user is cute but doesn't translate well internationally. Very fast one bumps into the sometimes tricky social norms associated with pronouns, and significant time is then spent dealing with the subtilities while the clueless person at the top is bitter about the fuss made about things they still think are trivial.

IMHO being clear beats being natural.

Even Amazon has this issue where "Your" is very brief in English so they stuck it on "Your Payments" "Your account" etc., and it makes for a weird mess in other languages where it needs to be dropped in some places but not others.

RegW 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I was once contracting at an ISP/telco in the naughties. While working on a UI to obtain PAC codes and transfer phone numbers, I was coding a modal confirmation dialog, when I almost unconsciously translated the specified "You sure" into "Are you sure?".

The QA guy kicked it back. So I took it a manager to get the spec corrected. The manager said to just follow the spec as written. No, I couldn't add a question mark. Apparently the company used language like this to appear "down with the kids".

I hadn't realised I had got so out-of-touch. So I went away and did as I was told. Oh well - I'm still here, but the telco isn't.