This issue messed up my work with custom perspectives. Because of this, I switched to English UI in order to create custom perspectives. I‘d like to know what others think. Just send the following report to OmniGroup:
As a user using custom perspectives using OmniFocus (OF) with German UI I noticed a translation mistake.
Let me explain…
There‘s DUE and DEFER in OF.
When using e.g. Inspector you see in the English UI for a project status the terms: Active / On Hold / Completed / Dropped
The German UI displays at the same location the terms (same order as in English before): Aktiv / Angehalten / Abgeschlossen / Aufgegeben
The German term ‚Angehalten‘ (for: On Hold) is here translated as the accompanying symbol indicates to what is used for e.g. CD players in English where we see in Germany the ‚Pause‘ button.
And now comes the discrepancy:
In custom perspectives you have the criteria „Has a project which…“ with specific variants
…
Has a project which is active or on hold
Has a project which is on hold
…
Has an active project which has a future defer date
In the German translation for these criteria you see „Hat ein Projekt, dass …“
…
Hat ein Projekt, das aktiv oder zurückgestellt ist
Hat ein Projekt, das zurückgestellt ist
…
Hat ein aktives Projekt, das ein Zurückstellungsdatum in der Zukunft hat
Now you must know, in German …zurückgestellt… (deferred) (first and 2nd mentioned German translation of the criteria above) and the term …Zurückstellungsdatum… (defer date) relate to the same thing which is in English the OmniFocus topic of Defer.
Because of this, I had really trouble defining the correct custom perspective criteria with on hold and deferred items. My request is to do the following corrections in the German translation:
Hat ein Projekt, das aktiv ist oder angehalten wurde
Hat ein Projekt, das angehalten wurde
WIth the current terminology you use in the German translation I can not make the translated text shorter. There could be options referring more to the Pause mentioned above, but I‘d try to change as few terms as possible for your users.
Coming from the other side, I appreciate the confusion. Why use two words in German (angehalten / zurückgestellt)? The literal translation of them is not equivalent in meaning (put on hold / put back).
Otherwise, with respect to the meaning of “wurde”, is this not a future tense modifier? So, instead
Hat ein Projekt, das aktive order gehalten/angehalten ist
Hat ein Projekt, das angehalten ist
Finally, I do not agree with the "which is … " phrasing and would argue to replace it with “Has a project that is active or on hold” or “Has an active or an on hold project”. But this is my personal pet peeve about “which” and is by far secondary to your question.
Yeah, one should use the terms consistently. You need two different terms to make clear different topics are addressed.
The tenses are in my opinion not too important, but the terms mess up a user’s understanding. My assumption is the service OmniGroup uses for translations just translated portions of the app missing some context. When you e.g. translate with e.g. a key value spreadsheet you sometimes miss such topics. It takes much more time to go through all views and understand app semantics. It would help users to better create custom perspectives differentiating available/on hold/deferred.
…das angehalten ist: That‘s incorrect. ‚Angehalten wurde‘ is correct. If they would translate on hold with ‚pausiert‘, the you could write ‚Hat ein Projekt, das aktiv oder pausiert ist‘. But then the term would have to change at too many places.
I see that my literal translation of angehalten to English does not allow a literal translation of the associated verb tense between “ist” and “wurde” as “is” and “will be”. In any case …
… it seems that you and I both made a reasonable influence none-the-less.
I did perform the translation of apps I‘ve developed at work before. The challenge is to stick to a consistent language and keep things brief but descriptive enough.
