Re: [PATCH 1/2] po/de.po: add German translation

From: Jan Krüger <jk@jk.gs>
Date: Sep 6, 2010, 16:09 UTC
Message-ID: <20100906180935.4881dbb8@jk.gs>
In-Reply-To: <201009061741.27840.trast@student.ethz.ch>

Hi Thomas,

thanks for your comments so far. I pretty much agree with all of your thoughts, so below I'm going to focus on those where I have something to say in addition to that.

Show 6 quoted lines

> > +#, c-format
> > +msgid "nothing added to commit but untracked files present%s\n"
> > +msgstr "keine Änderungen für den Commit vorgemerkt, aber
> > unberücksichtigte Dateien vorhanden\n"
> 
> Loses the %s (which is used for advice).

That's me being careless. I will add an additional check to my workflow to prevent format string bugs from happening again.

Show 24 quoted lines

> [way earlier, and same goes for "by us" -> "hier" [lit. "here"]]
> > +msgid "deleted by them:"
> > +msgstr "dort gelöscht:"
> [lit. "deleted there"]
> > +
> [...]
> > +#, c-format
> > +msgid "behind %d] "
> > +msgstr "nur dort %d] "
> [lit. "only there"]
> 
> This had me pause for a moment.  The concepts of "[merge side] theirs"
> and "behind" are quite different; is it a good idea to translate these
> to the same?
> 
> Especially so since later on you translate
> 
> > +#, c-format
> > +msgid "path '%s' does not have our version"
> > +msgstr "Pfad '%s' hat keine Version 'von uns' im Index"
> [lit. "... 'of us' ..."]
> 
> I do agree that the best I can come up with, "von den anderen
> gelöscht", would be quite awkward.

This was one of the more difficult things to decide on while translating. Both are difficult to translate into something that "flows", and individually I think both work okay the way I decided to translate them (but see the next paragraph), but of course it would be preferrable to distinguish the two different concepts better. I'll be grateful for any suggestions.

The real problem, I think, is that "ours" and "theirs" are misnomers in the original terminology. A good translation, I think, will not try to translate them literally... that would get us from misnomers to misnomers that also don't lend themselves well to the target language. :) The question, then, is how to rephrase the messages elegantly without removing them all too far from the original idea.

This would be easier if "ours" and "theirs" always referred to the same concept... but they mean different things for merge vs. rebase, for instance.

Show 8 quoted lines

> [probably out of order, I found it while compiling the glossary]
> > +msgid "detached HEAD"
> > +msgstr "von HEAD abgetrennt"
> 
> That's not strictly speaking true; HEAD always points to a commit
> except in an unborn branch, and in any case (this is from commit.c)
> points to a commit after this message is output.  You could try
> "abgetrennter HEAD", "entkoppelter HEAD" or so...

Good catch. I think I might go with something a bit more verbose. Perhaps something along the lines of "nicht Teil eines definierten Branches", though obviously that exact phrase is a bit clunky...

-Jan