The generics of translation

Fabian Kreutz fabian.kreutz at qvantel.com
Fri Jul 6 02:41:35 CDT 2012


Moi!

AB> Other languages are not as terse
AB> as English. German is certainly the classic example of non-terseness.
AB> It's incredible how much longer German texts ususally are compared to
AB> their English original.

That depends.  It is in fact so if somebody translates the english into
german word by word and rearranges the gramar to fit.
Other languages have sometimes completely different ways of expressing the
same thing.  Unfortunately I cannot think of an example, but I changed
quite a lot of long english-like sentences into better german, thus
shortening the translation considerably.
Don't use bad translations as an argument to not translate at all.

In this case I would use the noun "die Zusammenführung" for both the
operation and the resulting changeset.  I don't see a need to give
the changeset a different name.  In english it might be more precise
to say "the merge changeset", because OTOH "merge" is such a generic
term.

AB> "Das File X wurde mit dem Merge e12eae2701c5 bereits geändert"
Datei X wurde in Zusammenführung e12eae2701c5 bereits geändert"


(I also don't see a need for articles in technical descriptions, but that
might be because there are no articles in finnish, so the finns leave
them away in all of their english texts - it drives me crazy!).

May I also ask, why you prefer "Das File" to "Die Datei"?

Bye, Fabian


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