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 <l...@gmx.de> 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
