If referring to Spanish in general without necessarily meaning any particular regional variant, what terminology should be used?

Question

For example if indicating that your site was translated into Spanish, obviously it's been translated into some particular variant, generic Latin American Spanish, Argentinian Spanish, Formal/Spain Spanish, Mexican Spanish, etc. However you probably don't want to turn off speakers of another variant by specifically excluding them...

Mutliple English variants are supported by the site (and we may eventually support multiple Spanish variants). The general form for the language list looks like:

Name (Variant)

e.g.

• English (Great Britain)
• English (Australia)
• English (United States)
• French (Brazil)
• French (France)
• Spanish (???)

So the question is what to put for Spanish inside the parentheses. I was thinking of maybe putting (General) (Neutral) or (Corriente). Any Ideas what would be best to put in this situation?

Answer 1

The most common terms you'll find are español neutro or español estándar.

Español neutro refers to a version of the language in which the differences between dialects have been, as the name suggested, neutralized. You should make sure, however, that it is indeed a neutral Spanish, and that can require a very astute translator to know which word (when multiple are used) is most likely to be readily understood by all speakers.

Español estándar refers to the standard language (which is taught to everyone and smoothens out some dialectal distinctions), which in theory is mostly neutral, but often refers more to the grammar (with vocabulary differences being more, but not entirely, tolerated).

In both cases, the terminology could still be problematic if users encounter words they aren't expecting ("You mean auto isn't standard? How dare you impose carro?" etc.) User reaction won't be that strong, but it can be a bit off-putting.

My personal recommendation would be to just leave it as Español and not have anything specified in parentheses.¹ If you must have something in parentheses, you can take the route that Microsoft has done, which is to say Español (internacional), which inclusive while at the same time not purporting to adjust itself in any particular way.

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^{1. For example, in your code, just do a quick if/then for whether a country code is present. If so, use parentheses, if not, just the language. You'd be adding a line or two of code, even less if you use a ternary operator :-)}

Answer 2

I would go with "non-specific" but it may depend on many things.

Obviously you distinguish between en-GB and en-US and en-CA. Each one would use the appropriate form for realise/realize, color/colour, anti-clockwise/counter-clockwise, learned/learnt and whatever is relevant in your application.

What are you exactly doing in Spanish for that one single flavor that your app has? Does is consistently use "carro" over "coche"? Does it mix terms from different countries? For example, you could consistently use always "coche" over "carro", as it is done in Spain, but if then you use "cancho" over "cerdo" then you are picking a term which may be preferred in some Latin American countries, but not in Spain (like mixing a colour here but a learned there).

So, if your flavor of Spanish sticks to something similar to the one in one of the Spanish-speaking countries I'll suggest that you say you abide some kind of standarization for localization (say, es-AR or es-CL).

If your app is using a potpurri of different flavors of Spanish I would suggest to label it as "non-descriptive" or "non-specific".