david-russo
commented
4 years ago Hi Micky,
I think you're right, making literal translations of proper nouns can introduce ambiguity. Unless there's a commonly used German translation of the spec. terminology (such as would appear in an official translation), it may instead be worth using the original proper nouns for spec.-specific terms and identifiers, such as "Common Chunk".
This would result in something like: "Document enthält keinen Common Chunk." or "Document enthält keinen Common Chunk (»comm«)." I'm not familiar with any conventions for indicating foreign-language words in German text (in English they are often italicized or surrounded in quotation marks), but if there are some, that might make it even clearer, e.g. "Document enthält keinen »Common Chunk«."
It would make some of the messages partially English, but should also help indicate their status as technical terms and improve searchability in the official spec. and on the web.
carlwilson
MartinSpeller
I'm currently looking at the German translations of the AIFF error messages and came across some odd instances. It essentially narrows down to literal translation of long names of the blocks - my feeling is that in translating those, trouble shooting the errors actually becomes harder. My suggestion would be to replace the English error codes to contain the Chunk-IDs as well and then to have those in the translation - that way we reach somewhat unified error messages across different languages. E.g. Current error message: "Document does not contain a Common Chunk " Current translation: "Dokument enthält keinen gängigen Block" New error message: "Document does not contain a Common Chunk (Chunk-ID: Comm)" New translation: "Document enthält keinen Informationsblock (Chunk-ID: Comm)"
If anyone agrees this makes sense, I would start changing the English AIFF messages prior to completing the translation review.