Re: German translation

[Jürgen Reuter]

   Hi all,

   at university, we actually *did* use the term "Fluchtsymbol" as
   translation for "escape character".  Using the English term "escape" in
   German language is just a (common but unnecessary) anglicism.

   (But in a text book for one of the courses at university, there also
   was the German translation "Roll- und Tastgerät" for  a mouse device,
   in order to ban the word "Maus", which actually no one else did it this
   way except a single professor.  That is, being used at university does
   not necessarily mean that it is common consensus...)

   Wikipedia prefers the term "Maskierungszeichen" for "escape character"
   (rather than escape sequence, consisting of multiple characters), and
   also mentions "Fluchtsymbol", see here:

   https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maskierungszeichen

   That is, I think "Fluchtsequenz" (for a sequence of escape characters)
   is fully ok.  Alternatively, one could use "Maskierungssequenz".

   I agree that in the context of programming languages, "procedure"
   definitively should not be translated as "Ablauf".  Niklaus Wirth used
   in his Pascal / Modula books the terms "Funktion" and "Prozedur" (the
   latter denoting a function without return value).  I guess, even in
   English, "function" should be preferred over "procedure"?  In
   object-oriented languages, the term "Methode" (English: "method") is
   preferred over "Prozedur" or "Funktion".

   Actually, I do not fully get the point of the message "point-and-click
   argument changed to procedure".  Is there an argument replaced by a
   function call?  If so, maybe a proper translation would be
   "'point-and-click'-Argument ersetzt durch Funktionsaufruf"?

   Greetings,
   Jürgen

   On Thu, Feb 13, 2020 at 11:11 AM Lukas-Fabian Moser <address@hidden> wrote:

     Folks,
     [tl;dr: Whom should I contact for improvement suggestions for the
     German
     PO file?]
     The German PO file contains some translations that seem to suffer
     from
     the "false friend"-syndrome, for instance
     #: convertrules.py:549
     msgid "point-and-click argument changed to procedure."
     msgstr "point-and-click-Argument zu Ablauf verändert"
     ("Ablauf" being a literal translation of 'procedure' that is wrong
     in a
     software context) and the famous
     #: lexer.ll:947
     #, c-format
     msgid "unknown escaped string: `\\%s'"
     msgstr "Ungültige Fluchtsequenz: »\\%s«"
     that you see quite often when using Lilypond on a German system - I
     think no-one knows what a "Fluchtsequenz" is supposed to be - maybe
     a
     sequence of successful prison escapes? (The usual German word would
     be,
     perhaps surprisingly, "Escape-Sequenz", but I think as a user-level
     error message, something like "Unbekanntes Kommando" might even be
     more
     helpful.)
     What's the right place to send such suggestions to? If there's going
     to
     be a new stable release soon, maybe it would be nice to get some of
     the
     more amusing translation gaffes fixed in time.
     Best
     Lukas