Re: English/German terminology, git.git's de.po, and pro-git

From: Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@inai.de>
Date: May 13, 2013, 13:57 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LNX.2.01.1305131542210.30808@nerf07.vanv.qr>
In-Reply-To: <87k3n36nvo.fsf@linux-k42r.v.cablecom.net>

On Monday 2013-05-13 14:54, Thomas Rast wrote:

>As I am sure you are all aware, there are two main religions as to how
>one can translate technical material into German: leave the technical
>terms mostly in English, or translate them to an appropriate
>corresponding word.  I'll denote them G+E and Ger, respectively.

The problem is that there are often no technical equivalent terms in Ger, leaving you only with Eng which are paraphrased (in more or less detail) in the German-language manpages.

"treeish" is one of those. The literal translation would be "baumig", "bäumlich". This is strange in German and at best only used by kids. In the SYNOPSIS section of e.g. git-ls-tree(1), you can get away with "baumähnlich", but in flowtext (prose), the sane choices are, for example:

	git-ls-tree erfordert als ersten nicht-Options-Parameter...

	~... einen "tree-ish", d.h. eine Referenz, aus der sich ein
	Baum-Objekt ableiten lässt.

	~... eine zu einem Baum-Objekt führende Refernz

	~... eine Baum-Objekt-Referenz
	(dies kann auch ein Commit sein, da jedem Commit genau ein
	Baum-Objekt zugeordnet ist)

>My vote is G+E.

Essentially, so is mine. German terms will be used where such have been used in prior computing (Bäume have been used in the 90s too, so that term is fine, for example). Stash however is something that could be seen as something that has had its first appearence in Git, with no corresponding native German term, in which case we should do it roughly like Wikipedia, that is, provide a German equivalent, but only for the introductory sake:

	Der Stash (dt: Versteck) bezeichnet einen Bereich ...

afterwards which the meaning of stash is at most re-recognizable in the verb:

	... mit `git stash` wird der aktuelle Zustand im Stash
	weggespeichert.

That's my common-world use.

>glossary for git's de.po is [2].  I have no idea what Sven and Ralph do.
>Perhaps a github wiki page would be fine for everyone?

A single wiki page might not suffice; we may need as much as one wiki page per term, so that there is ample visual space to record each person's comments and justification for choosing a particular German translation. (Just look at my go at "treeish" above, for example.)