Persisting and recurring quality issues in the German translation
Created by: roybaer
What can we do about the extremely heterogeneous quality of German translated messages?
While roughly half of them are flawless, many are ungrammatical or use misspelled compound nouns. (German compound nouns are never spelled with whitespace!)
Furthermore, some lexically correct translations are semantically closer to a riddle than to a translation. (I.e. "Try to guess the English phrase") One example is "Zoomauswahl". It is a valid translation of "zoom selection", but that function will not let you select a zoom level, it will let you zoom to a selection.
Mixing English and German acronyms for the same thing does not help, either. (In this case "VIA" and "DuKo")
The menu entries should also either all use infinitive or they should all use imperative, but not a wild mixture. They mostly look the same in English. (e.g. "[to] edit the file" vs. "[Computer?] Edit the file[!]") In German, however, they are different and infinitive is way more common in German GUIs.
All this leads me to the question: How can we address this and how can we prevent these issues in the future? Maybe one could put a glossary and translation guidelines in a document somewhere. Let's discuss!