I am working on a web site that is internationalized for English and Mexican Spanish. The site displays messages to users when they do something wrong on a form (i.e. validation messages). If they enter a date that is outside of a valid date range, the web site creates a message like the following (using English or Spanish based on the user's language preference):
Date must occur on or between 05/21/2017 and 06/20/2017
La fecha debe ocurrir en o entre 05/21/2017 y 06/20/2017
I'm not sure the phrase the site builds for Spanish is correct. I have the following questions:
- Is the date format correct for a Mexican Spanish speaker? I am aware of the Spanish way of expressing dates (i.e. day first) but since Mexican Spanish speakers deal with American English so frequently, I'm not sure. Should the dates be expressed as "21/05/2017" and "20/06/2017"?
- Should "el" precede both dates?
- Is it better to say "debe tener lugar entre" instead of "debe ocurrir en o entre"? Valid dates include the start and end dates in the range.