[Ready to Review] German - An alt Decision Tree

[alexejrotar]

For the frontmatter, I added translations in a PR for WAI website data.

Some open questions:

1. Sometimes english words make more sense (or are more common) even in german. For instance, I did not translate the word 'icon'. Should I wrap such words/terms in spans with a according lang attribute?
2. In german, most words referring to persons are gendered. E.g. the word 'user' is translated to either 'Nutzer' or 'Nutzerin'. The same goes for the articles, 'der' or 'die', respectively. In cases where the gender is unknown or irrelevant (as is mostly the case here), people used to use the male version as neutral. But now there is an ongoing effort to introduce gender-neutral forms to make the language more inclusive. They sort of combine both forms, such as 'Nutzer*in', 'Nutzer:in', 'Nutzer_in', or 'NutzerIn'. I think, a more inclusive language is important and so I used the form 'Nutzer:in' (for no particular reason). Not everyone might agree though, so a discussion about the proper translation of gendered words might be useful for consistency across the translations.

Resolves https://github.com/w3c/wai-translations/issues/159

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[alexejrotar]

Not sure why the checks fail, can't find anything in the logs. Any ideas?

[brianelton]

Not sure why the checks fail, can't find anything in the logs. Any ideas?

There are some odd general build issues, but it looks like the preview is working well, so no worries.

[shawna-slh]

Not sure why the checks fail, can't find anything in the logs. Any ideas?

Sorry, it's a known issue. We have two builds and one works and the other doesn't. We just haven't gotten to clean that up yet.

It's all fine and preview is at: https://deploy-preview-741--wai-tutorials2.netlify.app/tutorials/images/decision-tree/de

[shawna-slh]

assigning @remibetin for the open questions, and he will bring to me what I can help with :-)

[remibetin]

Thank you very much @alexejrotar for this translation of a very popular resource!

Sometimes english words make more sense (or are more common) even in german. For instance, I did not translate the word 'icon'. Should I wrap such words/terms in spans with a according lang attribute?

I have some preliminary questions/remarks:

• If commonly used in German, is is still considered by most people an "English-language term"?
• Have you considered "Symbole/Symbolen"? Or would you say it is not appropriate in this context? I say so because I have seen it used to translate "icon/icons" in the WCAG 2.1 Unofficial translation into German or in this documentation page from Apple Please note German is not my native language so feel free to consider these remarks as naive and possibly invalid.

Gender-neutral language

I will get back to you later on this.

[alexejrotar]

I have some preliminary questions/remarks:

• If commonly used in German, is is still considered by most people an "English-language term"?
• Have you considered "Symbole/Symbolen"? Or would you say it is not appropriate in this context? I say so because I have seen it used to translate "icon/icons" in the WCAG 2.1 Unofficial translation into German or in this documentation page from Apple

Short version I prefer "Icon" but I guess "Symbol" should be fine.

Long version It's not a naive remark, I guess this is a subtle question, as indicated by the fact that the resources you linked to translate it like this. "Symbol" in german is pretty much the translation for symbol in english and I guess you wouldn't normally use symbol and icon interchangeably. "Icon" in german is used exclusively for digital icons. When talking about web design, I would always use it rather then "Symbol" but that might be a personal preference. At least it's so common that there is a Wikipedia entry in german about icons and also a Duden entry (german dictionary). Still, people would recognize it as an english word an pronounce it as such. Not sure how a screen reader would pronounce it though.. Maybe others feel different about it. I guess "Symbol" would be alright and people would know what you mean.

[remibetin]

In german, most words referring to persons are gendered. E.g. the word 'user' is translated to either 'Nutzer' or 'Nutzerin'.

Gender-neutral forms are indeed preferable. That being said, it is important to use forms that most readers are familiar with; and that are easy to read and understand, since readability is a WCAG guideline.

We plan to update the original version to use the plural form "users". Would the use of the plural in German help in this instance?

[alexejrotar]

Would the use of the plural in German help in this instance?

Unfortunately, no. Plurals are also gendered - "die Nutzer" is the male plural, "die Nutzerinnen" is the female plural. So one convention is to write "Nutzer*innen".

That being said, it is important to use forms that most readers are familiar with; and that are easy to read and understand, since readability is a WCAG guideline.

That bothered me as well, so I looked into accessible and gender-neutral language. From the few articles that I read about it, it seems that the gender-neutral forms are not considered accessible because they (intentionally) disrupt the flow and because they are read in an awkward way when using a screenreader. Some recommendations that I found said to use both forms, which can be often seen in recent texts, e.g "Nutzerinnen und Nutzer" to refer to users. That is a) somewhat verbose, and b) still excludes non-binary people. Still, I can see now that using the asterisk version is not a good idea, so I would change that. Not quite sure how, though. Hope some german speakers can add their thoughts..

[j9t]

Hi @alexejrotar, @remibetin—I quickly went through the translation. Overall LGTM (can share some smaller suggestions later), but there’s one bigger theme—many terms are separated even though they need to be written together. For example, it should be “alt-Entscheidungsbaum,” “alt-Attribut”, “img-Element”, as these form single nouns in German. I cannot find an exception in Duden grammar rules (“Die Bestandteile von Zusammensetzungen werden zusammengeschrieben”).

Can you review and update the translation accordingly?

Rémi, I couldn’t yet check but I imagine this to be an issue in other W3C translations, too. To avoid inconsistencies this probably needs documentation and review. (I believe we touched on this earlier but it may have been in GitHub, and not in email, where I couldn’t find it again.)

[remibetin]

Rémi, I couldn’t yet check but I imagine this to be an issue in other W3C translations, too. To avoid inconsistencies this probably needs documentation and review. (I believe we touched on this earlier but it may have been in GitHub, and not in email, where I couldn’t find it again.)

I recommend that you to open a Pull Request to edit the German glossary: https://github.com/w3c/translation-glossaries/blob/main/Deutsch-German.md. Make sure to include the rationale behind this, so that others can eventually add their input.

[alexejrotar]

Thanks for review @j9t. Indeed, I didn't pay much attention to this. I will fix this.

[D-oro]

That's my review completed :) Happy to discuss further as needed.

[alexejrotar]

Thanks @j9t and @D-oro for the reviews! I integrated most of your feedback, only two comments remain unresolved. Happy to discuss them further.

[remibetin]

Thanks @alexejrotar!

@D-oro @j9t Can you take a look at https://github.com/w3c/wai-tutorials/pull/741#discussion_r1534161751 & https://github.com/w3c/wai-tutorials/pull/741#discussion_r1534157438 in case you have any final comments?

We are nearly ready to publish this new translation!

[j9t]

Hi @remibetin—would love to, unfortunately in the middle of a move right now (my availability would only be better starting next week). Wouldn’t want to hold anything up, so if @D-oro has a chance to review I hope that works.

[remibetin]

@j9t Thanks for your reply and much appreciated suggestion. That would indeed work. I wish you a good move!

[remibetin]

Thank you @D-oro for your review! cc @alexejrotar

[alexejrotar]

Sorry for not replying for a while. I'm on a trip where i barely have any connection. I also don't have my notebook, so I won't be able to integrate the changes until I return in the end of april. If you want it integrated earlier, feel free to commit the suggested changes for the remaining unresolved comments. I like the suggestions. Thanks @D-oro and @j9t!

[remibetin]

@alexejrotar I have applied the suggestions.

Thank you all for your collaborative work on this translation! cc @D-oro @j9t

[shawna-slh]

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this!

[remibetin]

QA done: ✅