The generics of translation

[Fabian Kreutz]

Hi!

I always find it interesting how much discussion there is occasionally.
I wrote the text into the .po header (now wiki page) after first consulting
all translators at that time.

Of course I'm always open to discussion, but I don't find it useful that
with the tides of attention of contributors the rules are changed and
discussed every time.

Second, language evolves. It evolves if you plan it or not.
I see it as the point of the official translators to direct that evolution.
If I now invent the word "Binärriese" (I'm actually rather proud of that
one :) ) then in 5 years it will be the natural word for everybody to use.
At least that happens with all words.
In the same way, if we use "largefile" (which I find also in english to be
a very sloppy name) then that will be just as natural.
I find it useless to talk about how the word feels now to people that know
only the english version (as no german word exists yet).
As translators we can choose to create words or we can choose to introduce
more english into the german language, and it will not have an effect on
how that word will "feel" or fit into the language 10 years from now.

Personally I'm glad whenever somebody was so bold to create a german word.
It gives me options! Maybe due to my knowlegde of the english language
I was never handicapped for using a correspondend german word.

OTOH we create problems if we let half the people say "Hast Du schon gepullt?"
when the other half say "Hast Du schon abgerufen?"

(Using pull (even using "die Pull-Operation") will lead to the use of pull
as a verb: gepullt. And that sounds like "pullern" - an old word for peeing)

Bye, Fabian

----- Original Message -----
From: "Adrian Buehlmann" <adrian at cadifra.com>
To: "Martin Schröder" <martin.schroeder at nerdluecht.de>
Cc: "Fabian Kreutz" <fabian.kreutz at qvantel.com>, "rupert.thurner" <rupert.thurner at gmail.com>, "Mercurial Development" <mercurial-devel at selenic.com>
Sent: Tuesday, July 3, 2012 11:16:24 PM
Subject: Re: The generics of translation

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