i18n-de: Translation of "merge"

[Thomas Arendsen Hein]

Hi!

Sorry for writing a mail completely in German language and therefore
starting a long discussion. While writing the mail I thought about
which language to use, but since most of the content were German
words anyway I continued in that language.

For other readers' benefit here is the commentary/translation:

* Thomas Arendsen Hein <thomas at intevation.de> [20120702 17:43]:
> * Kevin Bullock <kbullock+mercurial at ringworld.org> [20120701 22:19]:
> > What's the word used for merging onto a freeway? That at least suggests a similar visual image to a DAG-based merge.
> 
> Die Strassen vereinigen sich, die Spuren werden zusammengeführt, die
> Autos müssen sich einfädeln.

These are just three German example sentences to show that there are
many words for nearly the same thing where using the wrong word
might sound wrong. Translated back:
- The roads join.
- The traffic lanes join.
- The cars filter into the flow of traffic.

> * Adrian Buehlmann <adrian at cadifra.com> [20120701 23:06]:
> > Für die Deutsch-Sprechenden: Vielleicht wäre "vereinen" passend?
> 
> "vereinen" klingt hier für mich leicht unpassend, das Substantiv
> wäre ohnehin "Vereinigung" (nicht "Vereinung"), daher mein
> Vorschlag: "vereinigen" und "Vereinigung"

"vereinen" (combine/meld/join/unify) sounds a bit unsuitable to me
in this context, the noun would be "Vereinigung"
(union/aggregation/combination, same word as the noun for the verb
"vereinigen") not "Vereinung" (non-existing word, but a noun for
"vereinen" could have looked like this), therefore my suggestion:
"vereinigen" (combine/fuse/join/unite) und "Vereinigung".

I hope you see now why all this information was (mostly?) useless
for other translations. Maybe I should have stated that it is.


Adrian said that many developers do not translate words like "merge"
or "file", and often I have the same opinion, but this really
depends on the availability of a good German phrase for such things.
So while I would use "Datei" for "file", I'm talking about "Merge"
and "Changeset" instead of "Zusammenführung" and "Änderungssatz",
which both give me the creeps[1] :)

Therefore I would prefer to use foreign technical terms where a
suitable native technical terms does not (yet) exist.

According to http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge the word "Merge" is
a technical term in German language, too, so we could just use this
in the translation. But during reading that article I noticed the
following sentence:

"Merge [...] ist der Vorgang des Abgleichens mehrerer Änderungen,
die an verschiedenen Versionen derselben Datei getätigt wurden."
(Merge is the process of adapting several changes, which have been
made to different versions of the same file)
So what about "Abgleich" and "abgleichen"?

Regards,
Thomas

[1] due to translations like
  "outstanding uncommitted merge"
to
  "Ausstehende nicht versionierte Zusammenführung"
I have disabled the translations for Mercurial in our company,
because nobody understands what is meant by this without translating
it back to English, while
"Merge wurde noch nicht eingecheckt"
is much clearer and shorter, even if it contains one and a half
foreign words.

-- 
thomas at intevation.de - http://intevation.de/~thomas/ - OpenPGP key: 0x5816791A
Intevation GmbH, Neuer Graben 17, 49074 Osnabrueck - AG Osnabrueck, HR B 18998
Geschaeftsfuehrer: Frank Koormann, Bernhard Reiter, Dr. Jan-Oliver Wagner