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

[Thomas Rast <trast@inf.ethz.ch>]

Hi

I hope I got together a Cc list that pretty much represents everyone
involved in git core and pro-git book translation into German.

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.  I
would really like to avoid rehashing that entire discussion in this
thread, if at all possible; we've flogged that horse enough.  See
e.g. [1] for previous threads on the git list about the transation.

However, an unfortunate and unsatisfactory situation has developed:
Christian Stimming's git-gui de.po uses a Ger translation, and Ralf
Thielow built core git's de.po on top of it, so it's also Ger.

Meanwhile, and independently, Sven Fuchs and Ralph Haussmann wrote a
translation of pro-git (which is also quite mature at this point, having
apparently begun in 2009), and as you probably guessed by now, it's G+E.

So that leaves us at a point where "the" libre Git book (and also the
one that happens to be hosted on git-scm.com, the official site) does
not match the terminology used by German git.

Like, at all.  They're not even remotely near each other.

Therefore, a total newbie would find at least one of those two totally
useless.  I haven't done a comprehensive survey yet, but it is my
impression that the commercial git books are also G+E, so the
hypothetical newbie would be stuck learning the English terms in one of
the two regardless.

So where to go from this mess?

Obviously -- unless the agreement is that the status quo should persist
-- we'd first have to sort out what the preferable translation should
be.  And I'm a bit scared of trying, except that a straw poll on IRC
gave me some hope that a simple majority vote could help settle it.

My vote is G+E.

After that, we should create a unified glossary.  Even in the G+E case,
a few terms would presumably be translated fully and some others might
have partial translations (checkout -> auschecken?).  The current
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?

Finally, converting the existing translation will require some manpower.
I'll help review things, as I have previously done for translation
updates of core git de.po; perhaps with a few more volunteers it can be
done pretty quickly.

Thanks for your time.

- Thomas



[1]  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/58315
     http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/156226/focus=156373
     http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/196779/focus=196792

[2]  https://github.com/ralfth/git-po-de/wiki/Glossary

-- 
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch