There was more than one reason I wrote my book in English (despite German being my native tongue). Two of them are:
- IT stuff is mostly English anyway. While translation efforts are necessary to let people come closer and learn, too many terms just carry over from English to the respective languages. German especially sucks and bends over for anglistification, or whatever I should call that.
- German just sucks. Inordertosay somethingverysimple youmayneedtoputtogetherhugewords and formtheseridiculouslylong, sentenceswithcommas, inplacesthatjust hurt.
So we just received the first chapter from an English-German translator we hired to fulfill the market need for a German edition of the text, and I nearly barfed.
- If my publisher “spoils” me, that does not mean that I am rotten afterwards!
- Translating the titles of books I reference which have not been translated to German just sucks.
- German has a tendency to make everything sound negative.
- Please do not translate “you may want to consider reading random posts or posts of interest on debian-user” with “read all posts on debian-user!” (including the punctuation!)
- It’s not okay to fuse paragraphs here and insert breaks there, just like that.
- The set of Debian supporters is not the same as the set of people offering support for Debian.
- Either subscribe to the fucked up German language reform (.de only) or don’t, but do not change your mind every paragraph! Actually, just don’t. It hurts.
So we have a long path ahead until we can offer this book in a German translation according to our quality standards.
PS: blogging is a great way to let off steam.
