RFC: German translation vocabulary

[Christian Stimming <stimming@tuhh.de>]

Dear all,

as git-gui has now picked up the i18n features and the initial German 
translation has been included as well, it is about time to discuss and 
finalize the actual translation wordings of git terminology in German. 

In particular, for all keywords of git and git-gui one needs to find 
corresponding keywords in German, which will then be used consistently 
throughout all of git-gui translations. Those keywords and (for some of them) 
their english definition are contained in the "glossary" file, see [1]. I 
would like to invite all German-speaking readers here to review the German 
keyword translations that have been chosen in the glossary, and I'll denote 
the most important ones below for immediate feedback. 

(I'll mostly stick to an english discussion so that other languages can use 
this as a model on how to discuss this, if they want to.)

One word on the intended audience for the translated git-gui: The translated 
form of git-gui is *not for you* :-). In other words, it is not intended for 
those who are reading this list and, by doing so, are completely familiar 
with all the English terminology of git. Instead, the translation is intended 
for German developers who know *some* English, but feel much more comfortable 
with a fully German development environment and probably wouldn't touch an 
english-language git-gui anyway. Hence, the translation should try really 
hard to find German words wherever possible.

Also, other version control systems have worked on their German translation as 
well. If you want to check the wordings that have been chosen there, I'd 
recommend looking into their translations [2].

I'll list the most important glossary terms here, starting with the easier 
ones:

repository - Projektarchiv
revision - Version
staging area - Bereitstellung
branch [noun] - Zweig
branch  [verb] - verzweigen
working copy, working tree - Arbeitskopie
[commit] message - Meldung (Nachricht?; Source Safe: Kommentar)

For some of them you can see alternatives considered in the glossary [1], but 
overall the above ones were rather easy. Now for the difficult ones:

commit [noun] 
commit [verb]
checkout [noun]
checkout [verb]

I'm still rather unsure what to do about them. One problem here is that both 
words are used in several different meanings all at once. For example, 
the "commit [noun]" is used interchangeably with "revision". I'm actually 
inclined to translate it with "Version" for exactly that reason. And 
then "checkout": The noun is probably used interchangeably with "working 
copy". Hence, it could be translated as such. OTOH the verb means "to update 
the working copy", and it could be translated as such instead of one single 
word. This would leave only "commit [verb]" as the last tricky issue for 
which a single-word translation must be found. "übertragen" is my current 
favorite but I'm absolutely open for further proposals here.

As you can see in the glossary file, I'm still unhappy with the translations 
for those, but anyway here's the current status (not taking into account the 
discussion of the previous paragraph so far):

msgid "checkout [noun]"
msgstr "Auscheck? Ausspielung? Abruf? (Source Safe: Auscheckvorgang)"

msgid "checkout [verb]"
msgstr "auschecken? ausspielen? abrufen? (Source Safe: auschecken)"

msgid "commit [noun]"
msgstr "Übertragung (Sendung?, Übergabe?, Einspielung?, Ablagevorgang?)"

msgid "commit [verb]"
msgstr "übertragen (TortoiseSVN: übertragen; Source Safe: einchecken; senden?, 
übergeben?, einspielen?, einpflegen?, ablegen?)"

Regards,

Christian Stimming


[1] http://repo.or.cz/w/git-gui.git?a=blob_plain;f=po/glossary/de.po;hb=HEAD 
(note: the file is in UTF-8, but repo.or.cz's webserver claims it is latin1, 
hence the messed-up Umlauts)

[2] 
* http://tortoisesvn.net/docs/release/TortoiseSVN_de/index.html (very good)
* http://msdn.microsoft.com/de-de/library/ms181038(vs.80).aspx (MS Visual 
Source Safe, commercial)
* http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/translations/german/Kap_06.html (not so good)
* 
http://tortoisecvs.cvs.sourceforge.net/tortoisecvs/po/TortoiseCVS/de_DE.po?view=markup 
(not so good)
* http://rapidsvn.tigris.org/svn/rapidsvn/trunk/src/locale/de/rapidsvn.po 
(username=guest, password empty, quite bad)