[Owncloud] Translation to German: 2 Questions

[Jan-Christoph Borchardt]

Hey Florian, great to have you!

I’m a translator myself, was on the Ubuntu German translation team and
translated a load of other projects.

On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 1:34 AM, Frank Karlitschek <frank at owncloud.org> wrote:
> Hi Florian,
>
>
>
> On 23.05.2012, at 21:26, Florian Rüchel <florian.ruechel at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>> I am new on the ownCloud team and I wanted to start by translating stuff
>> to German since it is my native language.
>>
>> I noticed Mirall was not at all translated so I wanted to start there.
>
> awesome.
>
>
>> Two questions ocurred for me:
>> The first being whether we should talk to people in the formal "Sie" or
>> the informal "Du" in German? As a third option one might consider two
>> languages but that might also be a bit too much.
>> For those of you not familiar with the distinction between the two
>> salutations: You would a address your friends with "Du" and your
>> business partners and strangers with "Sie", both meaning "you".
>>
>> My personal opinion on that topic is "Du", since I would see the service
>> more targeted against private users (like in Dropbox) than business
>> customers, but I am aware of the "Company support" option so I would
>> like to have your opinion before I start translating the corresponding
>> strings.
>
>
> Currently the translation is using "Du". Today I had a meeting with a big government organization in Germany than will use ownCloud in the future. They complained that we use "Du"
> So using "Sie" might be saver because it works for everybody.
> But this is open for discussion of course.
>

This is a discussion in most high-profile projects. I generally am for
»Du« because it is more friendly, and lots of projects do it like that
for this reason. When translating, I usually formulate it so the usage
of either is avoided. This also makes for shorter and more
understandable translations.


>
>> The second issue is mostly a question of length and the degree to what
>> you want to translate ownCloud:
>> A good example might be "Sync". This is the short version of
>> "Synchronisation" and in German it would have the same lengthy string. I
>> am not a 100% sure now whether it wouldn't sound kinda wrong to say
>> "Sync" in German. On the one hand its completely analogous to do it, on
>> the other hand it sounds wrong (you could shortend it as a verb
>> translating "to sync sth." to "etw. syncen" but this would mix German
>> and English here).
>> So two issues appear here: If a use the full length, then the buttons
>> are surely too short so either they get bigger (wasting space) or the
>> text gets truncated (looking stupid / impossible to read). The other
>> issue is how much you want to translate and if you are comfortable if a
>> certain amount of words is being kept in English as it is commonly used
>> at least among the younger generations already.
>
> I´m actually a big fan of keeping english term that are just common in German. Sync is on of it in my opinion. Sometimes it sounds stupid and the text get very long if you try to find a german word for every special term that´s used.
>

Some Projects translate »Synchronization« as »Abgleich« – but as the
German word »Synchronisation« is basically the same, »Sync« is not
even an exception. »Syncen« is also fine.


> :-)
>
>
>>
>> Looking forward to your answers,
>> Cheers
>> Florian
>
>
> Cheers
> Frank
>
>
>
>
>
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