From: Pit Capitain <pit@...>
Date: 2003-02-12T17:24:36+09:00
Subject: Re: [OT] German (Re: was Re: turning modules into classes)

On 12 Feb 2003 at 6:30, Mauricio Fern�ndez wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 12, 2003 at 05:30:00AM +0900, Pit Capitain wrote:
> > On 12 Feb 2003 at 2:39, Mauricio Fern�ndez wrote:
> > 
> > > Just to try to get this to be somewhat on topic, does anyone else think
> > > that German feels just like forth?
> > 
> > >  * lots of _words_
> > 
> > viele Worte (two instead of the three above :-)
> 
> When I say lots of _words_ I don't mean that it's very wordy [though it
> tends to be, just look for an operating manual in several languages.
> Many times, German takes the longest...

Yeah, I know. See the smiley above. I often had hard times 
translating an English GUI into German. There never was enough space 
for the long labels and text fields...

> (...)

> Haha, I just bought "XML kurz and gut" (my first O'Reilly book in German!),
> so I can give you one example of why I feel German has that forth
> feeling. First sentence:
>  
> Die erweiterte Markup-Sprache XML (eXtensible Markup Language) ist ein
> Dokumentenverarbeitungsstandard, der vom World-Wide-Web-Konsortium (W3C)
> vorgeschlagen wurde --- demselben Gremium, das auch f�r die �berwachung
> des HTML-Standards verantwortlich ist.
> 
> der Dokumentenverarbeitungsstandard: OUCH!
>  das Dokument + die Verarbeitung + der Standard
> 
> It looks just OK for Germans, it seems too long a word for most other
> people (really!).

This includes me (a German). I often see those constructs, but I 
think they are the results of poor translations (there are some other 
faults in the short example above). Compare it to Ruby or other 
programming languages: it is legal syntax to write methods several 
pages long, but it's not considered good style.

The worst translations I've seen were in German Microsoft products. I 
just couldn't understand most of their messages. The best I could do 
was to think of a possible English translation of each word. Then I 
could guess their meaning.

> (...)

Regards,
Pit