At the end of an intense process of expert hearings, thesaurus discussions, translation sprints, legal language comparisons and several rounds of fine-tuning the texts, the unified German translation of CC licenses version 4.0 is finally here.
It is the first time that a CC tool is available in just one consolidated text for all German-speaking users. The coordination
necessary happened between the CC teams in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Although the language variants between these main German-speaking countries are considered relatively small, consolidating legal texts that are equally aimed at lay people and professionals proved considerably harder than expected.
We would like to thank the open content experts and commons activists
involved:
Annette Kaufmann
Alexander Baratsits
Armin Talke
Christoph Endell
Joachim Losehand
Klaus Graf
Leonhard Dobusch
Lukas Mezger
Magdalena Reiter
Matthias Schmid
Max von Grafenstein
Michela Vignoli
Nicole Lieger
Paul Klimpel
Roland Alton-Scheidl
Simon Schlauri
Till Jaeger
Till Kreutzer
several other commenters of the public commenting phase on co-ment.com and John Weitzmann of CC Germany for leading the effort.
Here is an excerpt of our discussion, whether headline may end with points or colons:
Hi Diane!
> I'm confused about #5. All of the other headers in that section end
> with a period, not a colon.
The others are semantically not headers, but a very short summary of what downstream recipients are allowed to do, followed by an explanation. This semantic is expressed by the layout, as they are not on a separate line.
In fact it is similar to introduction paragraphs like "Considerations for licensors: Our public licenses are intended ... " - here we also have colons.
> Wouldn't it just be easier to add a
> period there, so that it matches the other headers in that section
> and elsewhere? Or should they all be corrected?
Adding a period to a headline is not correct grammar in German. Yes, adding a colon to all would be a solution as well, both for introducing an enumeration in 2.a.5 and introducing the summary of a meaning in all 2.a.x.[Y] paragraphs.
> As for #2, if it is changed there, then are there other places it
> should be changed?
No, I do not see other places with this punctuation issue.
> I'll proceed with the rest of my review with these issues pending.
> Thanks again for your quick response on the noun matter.
Thank you for inspecting so deeply!
--Roland
