The parameter
Most languages give a speaker some way of signalling how they stand toward the person addressed. What varies is whether that signal is grammatical, how many steps it has and how much of the sentence it touches. In French or Russian it sits in one pronoun and its agreement. In Japanese it sits in the verb and spreads across the utterance. In English it has almost nowhere to sit.
Brown and Gilman's 1960 study of the pronouns of power and solidarity supplied the terms still in use. They took Latin tu and vos as the type case, hence T and V, and showed that European usage shifted over centuries from an asymmetric power semantic, in which the superior gave T and received V, toward a symmetric solidarity semantic marking closeness rather than rank. That shift is still in progress and moves at different speeds, which is why a Dutch and a German text of the same year and register may use different levels for the same relationship.
Brown and Levinson later reframed politeness as work done on face: the desire not to be imposed upon, which they call negative face, and the desire to be approved of, positive face. That framing explains why the systems are not interchangeable. A language without a T/V distinction has not lost politeness; it has redistributed it into modality, indirectness, title and greeting formulas. The parameter is about where politeness lives, not whether it exists.
Which term a particular text is expected to use is a separate question, and the conventions section takes it up under forms of address. This record keeps the compulsion: an opposition the grammar hands to every speaker of Dutch, German, Turkish or Spanish and to no speaker of English. That one keeps the expected choice inside it, and the two come apart cleanly. A corpus study of the job advertisements of 158 multinational companies found the choice tracking the sender's industry in Netherlandic Dutch and not tracking it in Belgian Dutch: one grammar, the same two terms available on both sides of the language area, and only one community using them to mean that.
How languages vary
- T/V distinction: a binary pronominal contrast, usually with verb agreement. French, German, Dutch, Russian, Turkish.
- No grammatical distinction: one second person form for everyone. English, which lost thou.
- Multi-level honorifics: politeness marked on the verb across graded levels. Japanese, with respectful, humble and plain-polite registers; Korean, with seven traditional speech levels of which few remain in use, plus a separate subject honorific; Javanese.
- Address by title and status: the honorific sits in a noun, not a pronoun. Polish, using pan and pani with third person agreement; Turkish, adding Bey and Hanım after a given name.
Johannes Helmbrecht's chapter on politeness distinctions in pronouns reports, for a sample of 207 languages: 136 with no politeness distinction in the second person pronoun, 49 with a binary distinction, 15 with multiple distinctions and 7 that avoid the pronoun for politeness reasons. The T/V pattern that feels universal to a European translator is a minority type worldwide.
Consequences for translation
Where the source marks the relationship grammatically and the target does not, the information has to be relocated. That is an interpersonal change, compulsory in that something must happen: a German Sie cannot be carried into English as a pronoun. What is not compulsory is the substitute, and that is where inconsistency creeps in. The carriers available in English are title and name, contraction, modality, request form and sentence length, each a matter of degree that can be applied unevenly.
The rule that follows is a document-level one. The register decision is taken once, written down and applied throughout, because the reader detects the relationship from the accumulation of signals rather than any single one. A text that alternates between "Dear Mr Yilmaz" and "Hi Ahmet" has made no translation error at any point and has still misrepresented the relationship.
The reverse direction is harder. Translating English into a T/V language forces a commitment the source did not make: an English business letter is neutral between formal and familiar, and German, Dutch or Russian has to choose. The choice is a factual claim about the parties, so wherever the tone of a relationship is contested, in correspondence tendered as evidence or in employment disputes, it should be raised with the client rather than made silently. The same holds for Japanese and Korean, where the translator is effectively writing the relationship.
Examples
DE>EN
- Source: Könnten Sie mir bitte die Unterlagen zusenden?
- Target: I would be grateful if you could send me the documents.
- Comment: The German formality rides on one pronoun. English rebuilds it from a longer, indirect frame. "Could you send me the documents?" is the same speech act at a different social distance.
NL>EN
- Source: Zoals u weet, is de termijn verstreken.
- Target: As you will be aware, the deadline has passed.
- Comment: Dutch u against jij is the whole signal. Moving from "as you know" to "as you will be aware" is the closest English equivalent, and it must be sustained through the letter.
EN>TR
- Source: Please confirm receipt.
- Target: Teyit etmenizi rica ederiz.
- Comment: Turkish must select a person form; the plural-polite -niz with formulaic rica ederiz fixes the relationship as institutional. The familiar alternative is equally grammatical and says what the English did not.
References
- Brown, R. & Gilman, A. (1960). "The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity." In Sebeok, T. A. (ed.), Style in Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 253–276.
- Brown, P. & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Helmbrecht, J. (2013). "Politeness Distinctions in Pronouns." In Dryer, M. S. & Haspelmath, M. (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, Ch. 45. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
- Agha, A. (1994). "Honorification." Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 23.