German translation of system-config-firewall

[Yaakov Nemoy]

2009/9/22 Thomas Woerner <twoerner at redhat.com>:
> Hello,
>
> as the maintainer of system-config-firewall, I have ongoing problems with
> german translations in this tool.
>
> In german there is no matching word for "trusted". The translation
> "vertraut" means "familiar" or "close", but not "trusted"! In the german
> language we are using "Trusted Computing" as a fixed term, because you can
> not have a short term explaining it correctly. Therefore I am also using
> "trusted" for services and interfaces.
>
> Every few weeks some translators are replacing the word "trusted" with
> "vertraut". Can you please stop doing this?
>
> I would appreciate if you are changing all occurrences of "vertraut" back to
> "trusted".

In dutch we also use vertrouwde, which more or less means the same thing.

As a linguistic note, certain words are formed based on latin roots in
english to create a new meaning when a word is needed. For example,
the word 'translate' is composed of two parts, which both imply
movement. The two parts have nothing to do with converting a text from
one language to another, and if you know the etymology, translate
sounds as akward as using vertraut to mean trusted.  Nevertheless, you
literally translate the word translate in german, to übersetzen.
(There is a gramatical shift depending on the meaning, but i'm
skipping that for now.) (In Dutch, you would say vertalen, which is
like saying 'versprachen' in German, which doesn't exist.)

Vertraut and Vertrouwde are the best literal translations, taking into
account the word stem and the grammatical usage (hence the ver-
prefix). It may sound akward, but at one point, the word television
sounded just as akward in English. It's equally akward switching to
'fernsehen', but Germans use that word without taking too much into
account. Your kids will have no problems with the word vertraut, just
like your grandparents were scratching their heads at this silly word
'fernsehen' at some point.

-Yaakov