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I am looking for titles for dialog boxes in my application, and I don't trust Google translate. Do such titles change from country to country?

I'm interested in providing a comfortable and linguistically familiar interface to all Spanish speakers, so I'm interested in differences in translation between as many countries as possible, and in case some country ends up missing from my list, what should be my fallback forms of the phrases, that would sound the least strange for the maximum number of people?

Google Translate gave me:

  • Elija el archivo para cifrar
  • Elija el archivo para descifrar

Respectivelly.

Would that be appropriate everywhere? How unified is Spanish across countries?

I speak Portuguese, and the differences between countries vocabularies are huge. While in Portugal they say "Ficheiro" for Folder in Brazil we say "Pasta" for the same word. So using a software translated to European Portuguese can be pretty awkward to a Brazilian like me.

We Brazilians rely heavily on anglicisms for example, while Portugal uses practically none (You call your mouse a mouse in Brazil, but in Portugal it's called rato, which means rat, not mouse... So you get why I need to know these things. I don't want to appear insensitive to differences like those).

The other Portuguese speaking countries have even weirder vocabularies, and I will address that in a question similar to this one on the Portuguese Language site.

Since the software can detect the precise Locale of the system, it can use the vocabulary specific for each and every country. I would like to not leave any Spanish speaking country out: if there are regional differences, I want to make sure they are accounted for in my software.

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    This site does not offer a translation service so it would be better to edit your question with some possibilties you have considered so people can help you go further. Specifying which countries you are interested in would help too as there are many hispanophone countries.
    – mdewey
    Commented Jan 29, 2017 at 12:26
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    Agreed with @mdewey. Please show what you have been investigating so far. Google Translate may be bad, but can be a good starting point: what did it offer to you? Edit the question to show this and make it on topic, according to what is described in How to Ask.
    – fedorqui
    Commented Jan 29, 2017 at 22:05
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    You might want to post your question here: es.stackoverflow.com
    – Walter Mitty
    Commented Jan 30, 2017 at 15:44
  • Thank you I will regarding my other phrases. I have only one answer here though, and I was hoping someone would be interested in providng some sort of full answer so I could accept it.
    – FinnTheHuman
    Commented Feb 1, 2017 at 12:28

1 Answer 1

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“Choose file to encrypt” in Spanish can be:

Seleccione el archivo para encriptar.

“Choose file to decrypt” can be:

Seleccione el archivo para desencriptar.

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    cifrar/descifrar sería mucho mejor. encriptar y desencriptar son anglicismos innecesarios debido a diferencias en los significados de cifrar y to cypher.
    – user0721090601
    Commented Jan 29, 2017 at 19:26
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    @guifa sin embargo el DRAE admite "encriptar" como sinónimo de "cifrar", y ni "cifrar" ni "encriptar" tienen entrada en el DPD, por lo que no parece que "encriptar" sea una mala opción.
    – Charlie
    Commented Jan 30, 2017 at 8:10
  • would that be appropriate for every Spanish speaking country? I speak portuguese and I can understand you're having a discussion about wether encriptar/desencriptar would be better than cifrar/descifrar. Wouldn't that be a regional thing? I want every user from every country to feel confortable. If in Spain they use anglicanisms but, for example, in Chile they don't, then I would use encriptar/desencriptar for European Spanish, but cifrar/descifrar for Chilean Spanish. The software is able to detect the system's precise Locale.
    – FinnTheHuman
    Commented Jan 30, 2017 at 12:58
  • @FinnTheHuman as guifa says, cifrar/descifrar would be a better option and it would be understood also in Spain. It does not sound strange here, in fact, the word "cifrar" is quite old (a sentence from 1728, Spain: "le fue fácil descifrar lo que él mismo había cifrado") while "encriptar" is a neologism (dating from the 90s).
    – Charlie
    Commented Jan 30, 2017 at 13:59
  • Fundéu finds no problem with the use of encriptar, according to this article: fundeu.es/recomendacion/encriptar-es-un-termino-valido
    – Gorpik
    Commented Jan 30, 2017 at 15:15

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