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The following describes the situation about a German translation which is not bad, but does not help the professionals.

It is mostly a inner German problem.

Sichten as translation for View in the context of database programming

Since View is a keyword of SQL (structured Query Language), professionals have to know it. They must use it in their program code. E.g.

CREATE VIEW german_users
AS
SELECT * 
FROM stackoverflow_users
WHERE mother_language = 'german';

uppercase Words are keywords, the part of the language each profession simply has to learn.

Some brands like Microsoft are using the German translation Sichten for View when talking about Views.

From linguistic point the translation is chosen rather good.

The common meaning of the word in English is mapped to the common German word.

The true problem is, that the use of a translation here is not necessary, doesn't help much To understand the new abstract object and forces the professional to use two words for the same thing and make searching with google difficult.

BTW I'm such a professional, I'm not using the German translation. I think that this translation is pure cf. question about Quatscht.

Which questions are allowed in this context?

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  • 3
    I was seriously quite surprised that Wikipedia really has “Sicht” as the translation for the database view.. Personally, I would never translate such things. Apart from that I don’t really get what you are asking.
    – poke
    May 29, 2011 at 22:30
  • 1
    Count me in with the not sure what your question is crowd.
    – deceze
    May 30, 2011 at 6:13
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    Please make your question more specific. It is too open, and thus unanswerable ("which questions are allowed?" - there are literally infinite acceptable questions). Wenn es Dir leichter fällt, schreib Deine Frage ruhig auf deutsch - falls nötig, wird sie übersetzt.
    – fzwo
    May 30, 2011 at 7:38
  • Is your question: can I ask questions about unsatisfactory translations? I say yes, there are ways to ask such questions.
    – Glen Wheeler
    May 30, 2011 at 11:05
  • I observe that some nations France, Germany and the Netherlands have the bad habit to create translations for no good reason, but to avoid the use of foreign word. In the Italian language I observe an easy to use their own words, when they exist and to assimilate foreign words without complain.
    – bernd_k
    May 30, 2011 at 11:16
  • But "Sicht" exists as a word. How do you tink the Americans/English builded the word 'View'? It's a common, english word, meaning 'Sicht'.
    – user unknown
    Jun 9, 2011 at 2:48

2 Answers 2

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Frankly, I am considering to close-vote this "question" because it is so vague.

The information I gather from your post is that you are convinced that translating "view" with "sichten" is a very bad idea.

That's fine, but where is your question?

I get the impression that you just want to push your opinion, so of course, a "question" about this subject would be closed if it is just an essay of your opinion.

On meta.philosophy, someone expressed this in the following way:

when a question reads like it should be ended with "Amirite?" it should be closed.

If you actually do have a question, it will certainly be possible to ask it in a non-argumentative way.

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  • Well I think, one can ask, if Sichten has the status of the correct word in this context in the sense of Duden or if it is more or less only inhouse translation of some commercial firms.
    – bernd_k
    Jun 9, 2011 at 8:38
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My answer to your question would be (after writing it, and remembering, after rereading the headline, we're on meta!):

My experience is, that some translations are going deep, and some do not, and some are very swallow.

Beginner and professional:

As a beginner, it is really helpful to get translations for otherwise rarely used words like 'thread, queue, stack, heap' and so on.

Today I'm used to the words, and I don't need a translation any more. But if I'm learning a computer language, I don't like to need a second book to translate the first book. If your english is very fluent, you could get the english Version of your book (if there is one - I guess so, if from MS).

I remember especially, when confronted with abbrv. like 'empl', 'dept' and 'debt' in the examples in the beginning - annoying. Today, I might not even tell you after reading a text, whether it was english or german.

Search engines:

It might be a problem, sometimes, and sometimes an advantage. If you search for "Sicht", it can't be code itself, it somehow has to be a prosa explantation.

inconsistent translation:

I experienced situations, where the text talked about 'mitarbeiter', and the code too, but ony partly - some parts still used 'employee', leading to syntax errors. :) Of course that's disturbing.

learning by doing:

Some people I met only know the english IT-word, and don't know the meaning of the word, outside of IT. Nor do they know a german translation for the word - which is often one of the possible translations for the non-IT-word (thread, repository). They only have a vague idea, what the word means.

conclusion:

It depends.

So the question you could ask, to get such answers, could be:

Which arguments do you have pro and contra translation ... Which experiences did you make?

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  • I doubt that 'thread' really helps, but I agree that translating queue, stack, heap might help.
    – bernd_k
    Jun 9, 2011 at 5:23
  • Man kann mehreren Diskussionsfäden gleichzeitig folgen (you can follow multiple discussion threads) - do you agree? Isn't this expression older than threads in IT?
    – user unknown
    Feb 4, 2012 at 20:13

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