Choosing Spanish Register

Requirements

The Steady App helps workers verify lost 1099 income for pandemic unemployment benefits. The company plans to make the app available to every US state that offered pandemic benefits, so its potential user base is very diverse—in California, there are over 200 languages spoken, and each might be represented by a Steady user.

Spanish is the second-most-widely-spoken language in the United States. Since we wanted the Steady experience to be equally accessible and trustworthy for our Spanish-speaking users as it would feel for our English-speaking users, it was important to handcraft a Spanish experience early on.

Comparing registers

We’d made the decision early on that we wanted the English Steady experience to feel as light and easy as a financial app could, and adhered to that by using casual and direct language to communicate ideas and give instructions.

I also knew that Spanish has different ways of expressing formality than in English, which would have to be taken into account.

English expresses formality through politeness and the use of modal verbs, without any real change to its grammar. You is you, no matter who you are.

On the other hand, formality does affect grammar in Spanish—specifically, via the use of tu (informal) vs. Usted (formal). This means that formality levels can still permeate outside of the removal of other forms of politeness (e.g. through colloquialisms) and create separation or keep the user at an arm’s length through pronouns and verb conjugation alone.

Researching tu vs Usted competitively

We wanted Steady to feel approachable, but we weren’t sure if adhering to the tu form would compromise trust by making us look amateur, or like we weren’t authorities in the realm of finance and benefits verification. It felt like a very fine line to walk, especially as a non-native speaker.

I decided do a short competitive analysis to get a picture of how other services were creating intimacy and trustworthiness in Spanish, while also maintaining authority in their realm. T-Mobile and Chase both emerged as great examples of choosing register strategically in their copy.

T-Mobile’s voice is informal and fun, and creates camaraderie and trustworthiness between the brand and its users. This is true in English and well as in Spanish. In copy across the website, they use the Spanish tu form.

Chase takes a similar approach, by using the tu form to discuss banking, and was a great company to compare as it operates in a similar financial space. Their Spanish copy demonstrated to me that tu creates approachability even when talking about serious topics like money. Alongside other choices in copy (like an invitation for users to invite friends), the Chase experience feels open and available to anyone.

Taking a stance on formality

Using T-Mobile and Chase as examples, I chose to use the tu register across most copy on the website. The tu register most naturally matched the word and phrase choices I was using to create friendliness and approachability for our Spanish users.

Making an early decision meant I could write the English and Spanish copy simultaneously, instead of making a decision in English to then translate it as next step to Spanish. Simultaneously language construction helped to create an experience that felt authentic and natural in both languages.

Since Spanish takes 25% more space than English to express similar ideas, I had to make sure Spanish would fit our designs by fitting it to our existing wireframes. Alongside testing copy in the Figma file, I created a copy deck for each user flow to hand off to our engineers.

Results and takeaways

Our Spanish copy tested very positively. Users responded well to the use of the tu register, and while they thought it was notable to see this register on a financial app, they did mention that it made the app sound “friendlier.”

This task was a fun challenge for me, as a fluent but non-native Spanish speaker. Ideally, a native Speaker would have been brought in to lead this. However, being a non-native speaker helped me to notice the difference in register use across different websites and domains like T-Mobile and Chase.

That all said, the Steady App will localize to other languages like French, Japanese, and Korean, and other languages approach register distinctly from both English and Spanish. Using the informal register across the board probably won’t work for those user groups, since users have different cultural expectations for the language a website or professional company uses. In those cases, writers who are speakers of those languages will have to look at the register and use of formality holistically in order to create an experience that supports our trustworthiness, rather than compromises it.