Thread:Sheck13/@comment-25085701-20190904173222/@comment-43649686-20190905091654

Hey Taldin,

thanks for your warm welcome.

Just a little about myself: I studied German and English here in Germany to become a teacher and my degree is a Staatsexamen in both languages which equates to the American Master's degree. I grew up here in Germany, but have an massive extended family in the US because of which I've spent at least 6 weeks every years since 1990 in the US. I have also been a great fan of rpgs every since the mid-90s so I'm pretty well-versed in the jargon.

Because of all that, there's little that I can complain about regarding translations. Your "game" is fantastic and the only challenging part in translating it is some of those fantastic puns your writers come up with. And sometimes it's hard if not impossible to keep all those cool alliterations going in a foreign language. (e.g. Resplendent Rapier could either be Glänzendes Rapier or Strahlender Säbel - both are okay but both are not quite as cool as the source).

Beyond all that praise, there are actually a few questions I have, even if I could probably ask some of them in the Wizards of the Wiki guild. But I figured I might just ask you some of them first.

1. In the German Translator's guild, there currently seem to be two other very active members and another one that has helped answer some questions before. Three of us were looking the Glossary and thinking about which terms to add and change. It's those changes I feel slightly insecure about that I wanted to bring up.

Habitica's German version currently uses a few terms that aren't ideal:

The tavern is translated as "Gasthaus". Now, that's not terrible but it's really more a term for "inn" and somewhat out of use. We thought that "Taverne" would actually work better. It's the typical term used in RPGs and closer to the source. So should German-speaking ever peruse the English wiki, it'd be easier to for them to figure out the connection, too.

But since "Gasthaus" is such a prominent word in the translation (it is its own segment in the navigation bar, after all), I felt intimidated about changing it. What do you guys from the staff think about changing such a big word?

Other words on a similar scale would be:

Party = currently Gruppe, which again is okay but feels a little un-RPG-y and also overlaps with the term for the group subscription. The three of us talked about in the guild chat and agreed that "Party" is a typical term in German versions RPGs too and could just be kept.

2 more terms that appear on the wiki are in a similar position:

"The Keep" as been translated as "Das Schloss (literally "The castle") and we felt it should be "Die Festung".

Courtyard has been translated as "Burgfried" which is some entirely different part of a castle. That should be "Innenhof" (a term still used" or "Burghof" which has a more medieval ring to it. Personally I'm for the more neutral "Innenhof" as I don't feel that everthing about Habitica has to have a medieval touch.

"The Keep" and "Courtyard"'s translations both are featured on the German wiki's header under "Mitwirken" (Contributions) and I would like to change them but do not know how to. Can you point to someone who would do that?

I know this is already a pretty long message, but two more things:

The guides of translations indicate that You/Your/Yours should be capitalized as they are in the game. Many if not most of the German pages so far do not reflect that. As I proofread German pages, I will remedy that and also add commas as I found many of them missing. Would such changes be considered minor changes or should I reflect those changes in the edit summaries?

Final question: The images for sample Habits (and Dailies) (https://habitica.fandom.com/de/wiki/Beispiele_f%C3%BCr_Gewohnheiten) in the German wiki look outdated. I tried jumping to the English version, copying the source from there into the German version but that didn't result in the same images. Even the English code sample Habits showed up in that weird old look. Do you know what has to be updated on the German wiki to get the nicer looking and up-to-date versions of the images set up?

I hope I didn't just flood you with too much information and too many questions and am looking forward to hearing from you again.

Cheers,

Sven