# Is formal German available?

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/formal-german-available/108696>\
**Category:** Translations\
**Created:** [February 8, 2019, 5:12pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/formal-german-available/108696 "2019-02-08T17:12:57Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 14

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**Author:** ![gerhard](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/gerhard/32/119479_2.png) [@gerhard](https://meta.discourse.org/u/gerhard)\
**Post date:** [May 14, 2019, 10:50am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/formal-german-available/108696/14 "2019-05-14T10:50:05Z")

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Sure, I could add `de_DE` as an additional German language, but please be advised that this solution is suboptimal and will be very frustrating for translators.

- There is no way to tell translators that `de` uses informal and `de_DE` uses formal language.

- The source language will be English. You need to start from scratch. Sure, you could import the existing German translations as a starting point, but afterwards there’s no way to sync them automatically. And as far as I know `de` and `de_DE` do not share the same translation memory, so that’s no help either.

- If you need the source language to be German you could create your own project on Transifex, add the German translations as source files and optionally configure [automatic updates for source files](https://docs.transifex.com/projects/updating-content#automatically-updating-source-files).

I’ll be sending a feature request to Transifex, but honestly I’d be surprised if this will be improved in the near future. Other platforms like [Crowdin](https://crowdin.com/) do a better job by allowing [custom languages](https://support.crowdin.com/changing-target-languages/#custom-languages).

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