If you want help us, visit the Stadtwiki:Community Portal

From Stadtwiki

Let's talk about translations.

Contents 1 Stadtviertel 2 Date 3 Capitalisation 4 Handwerkskammer

Stadtviertel

Stadtviertel

Karlsruhe has 27 districts and these districts are further divided into Stadtviertel (smaller parts).

Wikipedia says, it has 27 quarters.

Wikipedia is not using British English, that's why I asked a teacher in the UK. But she had no idea how to translate "Stadtviertel". --Wilhelm Bühler 08:42, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

I had contect with the Hauptamt of the City of Karlsruhe, it's not easy to translate. We should have a Artikel Stadtteil and Stadtviertel (or both in one) to explain, what this means in our region. -- Wilhelm Bühler 07:48, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

A possible translation is "raion", a word for sub-district administrative units coming from French, officially used in Eastern Europe, both for sub-districts of cities and sub-districts of countries.

--Ikar.us 13:17, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

We will use the same word as the Hauptamt, “quarters” is officially used in Karlsruhe. Feel free to redirect raion to Stadtviertel, after this article is written. --Wilhelm Bühler 13:31, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

The closest word used in England is probably “ward”. Technically, this is what in German would be a Stimmkreis for the Stadtrat. --Msohnius 11:53, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

In accordance with the City (Hauptamt), I would suggest to use the same words

“Karlsruhe has 27 districts which are subdivided into quarters.”

Stimmkreis is something different. -- Wilhelm Bühler 13:38, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Certainly. Quarter is probably best. In fact, “ward” may not be understood by Americans. It just so happens that a Karlsruhe Stadtviertel is about the size of a ward in the two cities in England where I ever voted, London and Cambridge. And I agree with you - we need explanatory articles for quarter and Stadtviertel along the lines of the ones for district and Stadtteil. --Msohnius 16:47, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

I started a Stadtviertel-article. I'm not sure, if other cities have Stadtviertel too, other cities have Stadtteile too. -- Wilhelm Bühler 18:23, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Date

I ask my english teacher in the UK about dates:

• You would say: ..."on the 28th of August" or "Thursday, 28th August 2008"
• We never leave out the 'th' but it all depends what you want to say and how you want to phrase it!

The US-Wikipedia is using "August 28". -- Wilhelm Bühler 07:51, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

I asked another teacher from the UK (England), he calls 28 August modern and 28th of August right. I used 28 August mainly for being shorter. --Wilhelm Bühler 13:33, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

There is a difference between written and spoken English. I would say that Wilhelm's teacher's comment is certainly correct for the spoken word, although to say “twenty-eight August” is very modern indeed! Car salesmen would say it, or estate agents. Forgive me, please, if I go on with a little treatise on the written versions, with which I am confronted on a daily basis. (I did once have jobs as University Lecturer – though not in English!)

The most common form in which dates are given in non-literary written contexts both in the UK and the U.S. is abbreviated: 04/05/2009 or 04/05/09, sometimes with the leading zeroes left out for day and month; the year always has either four or two digits. This is what is used on cheques (Am. checks), spreadsheets, or on informal written notes. Unfortunately, the example given means the 4th of May in the UK (and probably most of the Commonwealth) and Ireland, but April 5 in the U.S. and, I believe, Canada. Therefore, where the date must be unambiguous, such as in the internal communications of a global company like the one I work for, we write “4 May 2009” and our American colleagues write “May 4, 2009”. The dislike of English speakers for long words, however, means that only May is not abbreviated in lists of dates, spreadsheets and the like: all other months are abbreviated to their first three letters, e.g. the American 04/05 would be Apr 5. The month is spelled out in full in formal communication only. Finally, in handwritten letters or very formal letters one would use the form with the ordinal numbers, 5th of April, and in legal documents you can encounter anything unambiguous, up to things like this:

on this, the Twentieth Day of the Month of May in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Nine.

Back to spoken English: different from German, the abbreviated forms (05/04 or 5 Apr, or May 4) are always pronounced in full. Thus it is “fifth of April” or sometimes “five April” in England, and “fourth of May” or “May fourth” in America. On both sides of the Atlantic, it is always the “Fourth of July.” A single exception to the rule never to say the month as a numeral is 11 Sep, which in America is either “September eleven” or “nine eleven”, but only if it refers to the terrorist attacks. That is because of the association with 911, the emergency telephone number in North America.

Cheers, --Msohnius 16:36, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Some say, English is an easy language, other say, that US and UK are two nations divided by a common language.

To get articles about single calendar days, we need a schema Wikipedia is using April 5, so I used used 5 April. If abbreviated is most common, we can make redirects for 5 Apr too. The German version of Stadtwiki avoids abbreviation where ever posible. But I have no problems with redirects. Is this a way, we can go? -- Wilhelm Bühler 18:31, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

For the articles, absolutely! It's really for cases like long lists of dates like in the Holiday article that I am making a case for the abbreviations; after all, the German version uses the purely numerical format. And only because a purely numerical form would be ambiguous in English. Churchill surely got it right, with that quip about the "two countries"! (He had an American mother, so he had to know.) --Msohnius 23:22, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

So the “rule” could be

• In continuous text we use “day month” without leading zero and full monthname
• In list we use “day three-letter-abbr. of month”
• numerical forms like in the German version shall not be used due to ambiguousness.

Can you translate this into English and put in the Stadtwiki:Dictionary please? -- Wilhelm Bühler 08:04, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

I shall, but not before perhaps Tuesday next week. I am off on a little boat this weekend - no Internet!  :-) --Msohnius 23:51, 21 May 2009 (UTC) 

Capitalisation

Please capitalise the names of peoples and languages, even if used as adjectives. Example: “In German all nouns are capitalised, adjectives are not. Thus, in contrast to English, German uses lower case for the names of languages if used as adjectives: die deutsche Sprache = the German language.”

Verbs ending in -ise or -yse (such as “capitalise”) and nouns ending in -isation are nowadays consistently spelled with an 's' in the United Kingdom, even if, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, this is only correct in a few cases such as “analyse”. In America, these endings always have 'z', and most English-language spell-checkers will flag -ise as wrong, since they tend to default to LANG=en_US. Nevertheless, since this is consistent usage in England now, I propose to use the -ise variant. --Msohnius 12:18, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

I fully agree, you may add the facts (without the reasons) to the Stadtwiki:Dictionary directly. I love your example with the German Sprache :) -- Wilhelm Bühler 13:41, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Handwerkskammer

I would not agree with the translation offered by the Handwerkskammer Mainz. "Handicrafts" in English is "Kleinkunst", i.e. the output of artisans such as potters, weavers or doll makers. "Handwerker" in the German sense, i.e. highly skilled, apprenticed craftsmen such as butchers, carpenters or plumbers, are either "craftsmen" or "tradesmen", even if they trade nothing but their own labour. "Chamber of Trades" would probably be a better translation. Such institutions do, however, on the whole not exist in English speaking countries, which did away with the medieval guild system much earlier than countries in continental Europe. In England there are no bodies which issue formal accreditations and degrees to craftsmen, or regulate their training to the degree that a German Handelskammer would. There is now something called the "Guild of Master Builders", but it is a voluntary association to promote good practices and skills in the building trade, and no builder needs to belong to it. --Msohnius 19:00, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Thank you, I removed the remark about Mainz [1] with "Chamber of Handicrafts" (French: la Chambre des Métiers). -- Wilhelm Bühler 20:55, 29 August 2009 (UTC)