This is what I used so far:
Working Example
Block references
Single sentence:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua.
Multiple sentences:
- Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua.
- Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua.
Use Block Comments whenever it makes sense. That may be for example if you need to reference a long sentence or a sequence of sentences or whenever your question/answer is mostly just about one or few references.
Inline reference for sentences
This is why you wouldn't translate:
"What have you got on your mind?" to: "Was hast du auf deinem Verstand?"
If you do swap the words it would read "What have you got on your understanding?" sounds bad right?
Use Inline References whenever you feel it's right. Inline References work well in cases where you need to reference sentences multiple times inside of a floating text. In such cases Block Comments would blow your text into unreadable pieces. Just take the Inline Example and split it into multiple Block Comments - you'll end up with huge containers surrounded by fragments of words.
I use "
instead of “”
,„“
, or »«
for both German and English because "
is on my keyboard, the other are not.
Word references
Whenever you read or hear the word 'Geist' keep in mind that it may refer to both 'mind' and 'spirit' and emphasize for yourself by context and of cause by your own like.
For word comments/references I would just use italic in most cases:
word
But in some cases that might not be enough and I would additionally wrap the word in "
like this:
"word"
Why? Look at the example. The word mind appears two times. One time it's a reference and one time it is not. In cases where the referenced word and the sentence share the same language this can become confusing without a clear declaration and italic is not such a strong one. I could imagine cases worse than the one of the example.
code
formatting should not be used in this wrong manner, see also Using code ticks for technical term highlighting considered harmful. – user9551 Jul 5 '16 at 10:06