Comment by jzwinck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jzwinck | Hacker News Reader

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I lived in Asia for many years and worked with people from many places there.

It's common to hear "How should I address you?" This is equivalent to the people here suggesting a "nickname" field (good idea).

There are people with only one name. Don't make them double it (Ananda Ananda).

There are people with several given names. But they may only want to be called by the first, or the first two, or the last.

There are people who wish to be called by their full name. They may find it jarring to be addressed by just one piece of their name.

Finally there are people who go by a name which is not part of their legal name at all. Short forms like Bob instead of Robert, but also freeform names for various reasons, perhaps the most sensitive being that some government official may have determined their legal name contrary to their own wishes. Imagine your mother named you Sue but someone decided that must be short for Susan and put that on your government documents.

Related: when people want to show which part of their name is the family name, they either make it all uppercase or underline it. You can see this on some CVs but it happens elsewhere too when a full name is going to be read by people who don't know the addressee.

I have an elderly German aunt by marriage who considers it an affront that Vodafone sends her chirpy business letters starting "Hallo <<first name>>!" and continuing in the familiar second person instead of the more (to her) respectful "Sehr geehrte Frau Dr. <<last name>>," and formal "Sie" (grammatically third person plural, but also the formal second person). First names and familiar second person grammar are very much reserved for family and friends in that generation.

Is there a similar sentiment among older people in parts of Asia?

It is an affront though, a butchering of the language and just generally disrespectful. The distinction is an integral part of the German language and it's wholly inappropriate for a telco provider to address someone like this.

Same goes with names: missing accents, umlauts, special characters, wrong ordering, wrong titles/gender etc. is aggravating. And customers do complain.

German companies often spend a non-trivial amount on software engineering time and data cleanup to get these things right. And the French take it even more seriously.

Non-native speakers may not understand it, but that's no excuse and you will alienate people and customers. Even younger generations notice.

And just fyi I'm a millennial and per "Du" with everyone I know. Not my telco provider though.

It's your personal preference to be addressed with _Sie_, but languages change and German is seeing shift to the use of _Du_ even for transactional business [1]. Target audience, region, familiarity etc. will all affect which word is used. Claiming the use of _Du_ in customer relationships as "wholly inappropriate" again is an expression of personal preference, not fact.

[1] https://www.abendblatt.de/wirtschaft/article233949947/firmen...

Isn't personal preference the entire point, though? If the aforementioned German aunt is offended enough by how a company addresses her, she might stop doing business with them. That's a loss for the company and is something they might want to think about. (Or maybe not, but who knows.)

It got a lot more common during Covid, the social distancing rules in Supermarkets etc. were often written with the informal "Du", I guess to foster a sense of community and "we're all in this together".

I have a personal preference for wearing clothes in public. I think people would rather that was respected, certainly in my case.

Not saying she's unreasonable for feeling that way - just wondering if this is also something that should be considered in Asia, too, and giving a bit of context for people who aren't familiar with Germany. I know that Japanese has an even more "complicated" (to non-native-speakers) grammatical distinction of familiarity, but not much more about it, and have even less idea about how it works in other Asian languages/cultures.

Knowing what name to display isn't always enough - you also need to think about how the rest of the text around it should be translated to match. For German, the safe answer is still third-person plural Sie, unless you're absolutely certain your audience are all children, and missing that distinction might be taken by your audience as either that you're trying to be creepily over-familiar, or that you think they're children.

A sibling comment says that "Du" (second-person familiar) for business is becoming more common, and while that's true, I would NOT recommend using it without a good knowledge of German culture and your specific audience.

I'm not sure about older people, but business/formal emails in Japanese are like at least 70% fluff. There are loads of guides on the internet like [1], just look at the English translation of the example at the top...

Depending on the level of formality you might need to conjugate verbs slightly differently or use vocabulary that's considered more respectful. From my experience the younger generation is more relaxed about the rules, but Japan as a whole is pretty slow to change.

[1] https://www.wasabi-jpn.com/japanese-lessons/how-to-write-ema...

But this is the issue. There is not one way to do it right.

My ideal message from my telco would be this one line:

"Hi Leo, your monthly bill for <phone number> is available. Get it here: <url>"

going further i have a strong preference not to be named at all in an email from my phone company. let's keep it simple; if i want the email at all then i want to go right to the bill URL, in your example

I'd say it depends on the area and the type of business. In Lower Bavaria it's quite common to use informal language even with strangers. Any mechanic, plumber or other craftsmen will use "Du" the moment they see you. Formal language is usually used in a more formal environment, like banks or maybe some fancy restaurant or fancy shop.

I speak both german and french, and I don't like being addressed with "Du" or "Tu", be it in letters, email or whatever. It is for me a lack of respect.

In France the etiquette requires that you ask permission to use "Tu", and there are people who refuse you the right (it basically signals that they see you as a servant).

You would likely get a similar reaction in Japan by addressing letters to <given name> rather than <surname>, using plain style rather than polite style, and omitting keigo.

> It's common to hear "How should I address you?" This is equivalent to the people here suggesting a "nickname" field (good idea).

It’s not uncommon in the west either and it’s weird how much we ignored it in software e.g. “I’m John Q. Smith the Third but call me John” or “May I call you j-dog?”

> There are people who wish to be called by their full name. They may find it jarring to be addressed by just one piece of their name.

There’s also the issue of honorifics which you usually can’t get from names alone, as well as titles (whether professional or nobility) which can be very important to people’s identity.

Web apps great equalizer. No one cares if you are knighted or have phd, put in your name and you can watch funny cats same way as the rest of pleb.

Imagine if the name on a tomb does not match the one that the person preferred to be called with, and everybody used all the times. I know one case but I don't know the reason.

Loved ones sometimes pay to have nicknames engraved on tombstones. I think those things are often left off unless the nickname had strong significance to the closest friends and family members of the deceased

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