When I type in "do you want to go?" into Google Translate it gives me in French:
voulez-vous aller?
and in German it gives me
willst du gehen?
Is there a way to change the settings so that it always gives both the personal and polite form version for all languages which have this characteristic?
Using "thou" sometimes helps, and so does "you all", but there is no foolproof way to get the correct form.
Google translate is based on statistical inference (not structural parsing / substitution), so the vous/tu usage is inconsistent.
you are very pretty -> tu es très jolie
you are very nice -> vous êtes très belle
I can only speculate "pretty" is more intimate than "nice" and more often encountered with "tu" forms in parallel translations Google's algorithms were trained on.
thour (used for the polite form of your) works too from english to Dutch.
You can get the tu form by left clicking on the vous in your translation. Then choose
tu. Left click on any of the translated words and you will get a choice of alternatives.
For the German 'du' familiar form simply type 'du' instead of 'you'.
Example: "What do du want?" will translate as "was willst du werden?"
Just be sure to type 'du' the first time. If you accidentally type 'you' it keeps it in the proper 'Sie' formulation.
Hope that helps.
Here is my trick. Add words "Sir" or "Lady" to force formal.
eg. "You" --> "You lady" or "You Sir"
Informal
Formal
Then take out the "Sir" in the German language or "señor" in Spanish. Not sure if it works in other languages.
This worked for me: I used thou and thy, the old English familiar words for you, and it translated to tu in French, and if there were multiple you's in the sentence, I only did it with the first you, and it made all of the you's in that sentence informal.
You have to use :
dost thou want to go?
Which gets (almost) correctly translated to
tu veux aller?
I don't think there's a way to get both, as "you" is the polite form in english, and google will translate it to the polite form in other languages
tu is not the polite form in French. English does not have a separate polite and non-polite form.
Instead of using "you" in the English sentence, use either "tu" or "vous" as a substitute for YOU, and it uses that same pronoun in the French sentence!
I've struggled with this annoying problem for years.
German defaults to formal, so, yes, to obtain informal forms, you must trick the translator via context.
@Nicki Blake Chafetz suggests a very good solution.
Following that tip, I've found that for German, besides terms of endearment, using vulgar, insulting terms works most of the time. (Of course one must be very careful to replace them after translation!)
Examples:
Deutsch:
I scarcely know French, but it appears to work there, too:
For short phrases you can prefix the phrase with a formal or familiar context.
E.g. Mr Jones, You walk .... will give you a formal translation for You walk
E.g. My friend, You walk .... will give you an informal translation
I have just started having this problem. I Googled around and found some of the earlier solutions. I was able to gerry-rig the system in the following way.
If you stick in, alternatively, the terms: “lover” and “teacher” as the subjects of the sentence, then it will force the translator to conjugate in the formal and informal.
For instance, today, I was trying to tell my…Parisian lover that he could cook the steaks and I would cook everything else. Lol. (I am not good at cooking steaks.) But I am new at French. When I stuck in “[Y]ou can cook the steak,” it conjugated in the formal. But when I typed, “[L]over, [amoreux] you can cook the steak,” it came back with the “tu” form of pouvoir. Because…presumably if the two of you are knocking nasties, you are on familiar terms.
Reading elsewhere that the system could be gerry-rigged by the divine pronouns thou, thee, etc., but no longer was; I tried “pastor” as a subject that might force formality. I was surprised that this didn’t work. I am a pastor’s daughter, and so MY relationship with my own pastor was informal (haha), I assumed OTHER PEOPLE would consider their relationship with THEIR pastors on a more formal basis. Nope. “Tu.”
But when I used the noun-subject “teacher,” it forced the formal verb conjugations.
But…obviously this is bullshit and could be programmed so that we could toggle for it. If Google gave a shit.
For English to French ... if I type in "you" ... (eg. "you must pay") then it will give me the familiar form (tu dois payer). But if I enter "yous" (eg."yous must pay") - however bad that looks in English - it will give me the formal form (vous devez payer).
This surprised me, translating to Lithuanian:
"Can you come?" --> "Galite ateiti?" (plural/formal)
"Can you-singular come?" --> "Ar tu gali ateiti?" (singular/informal)
You can click on the translations to select between singular and plural as others have mentioned but it appeared to understand "you-singular" (or "you=singular"). After trying other variations, this seems to be a bit of a fluke and in some cases it even has the opposite, wrong effect. I guess this is just the sort of randomness you expect from probabilistic models.
The Translator.eu website tends to translate the neutral English "you" into second person plural in most languages including German, unlike the Google Translate which tends to translate it into the singular form.
So if you can't get the plural/polite form on Google it's worth trying Translator.eu.
The official way: Hover over the translation (result) and select the other forms in a dropdown list.
I've sent a feedback suggesting them to display the formal cases in a more explicit way. Let's see.
