The generics of translation

Adrian Buehlmann adrian at cadifra.com
Tue Jul 3 15:16:24 CDT 2012


On 2012-07-03 21:24, Adrian Buehlmann wrote:
> On 2012-07-03 19:57, Martin Schröder wrote:
>> Also, there is a difference between spoken and formal language. My
>> friends and I use "merge" as a German verb, but would rather write
>> "zusammenführen" in a documentation.
> 
> How about using "Merge-Vorgang"?
> 
> "Beim Merge-Vorgang werden die Dokumente..." ("When doing a merge, the
> documents are...").
> 
> "War der Merge-Vorgang erfolgreich, dann können Sie..." ("If the merge
> was successful, then you can...").
> 
> I think, in English using "merging" is almost as sloppy as the German
> transliteration "mergen". So if you find (German-ish) "mergen" not
> formal enough, you could perhaps avoid it in English as well by trying
> to use "execute a merge-operation!" (formal) instead of "do a merge!"
> (informal) ["Führen Sie einen Merge-Vorgang durch" vs "Mergen Sie!"].

I just digged a bit around. See for example the German (!) word
"scannen" (Engl.: "to scan").

You probably won't find that surprising, but it's in the Duden [1]. I
also found it used in a decision of the Swiss Bundesgericht (~"Swiss
Supreme Court", decision 4C.73/2007 of June 26, 2007). They are known
for using quite formal language and they in 2007 used "... das
Einscannen ..." (Engl.: "... the scanning...").

I wouldn't be surprised if they would have used "Scan-Vorgang" 20 years
ago (or so). Together with a reference to a scientific paper that
describes what a scanner is.

If there would be a Duden for developers, I think it would have the word
"mergen".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duden



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