Talk:Expropriation of the Princes in the Weimar Republic

Comments

Ist das eine Maschinenübersetzung? Verständliches Englisch jedenfalls ist das nicht. Und das geht schon beim Titel los. Um die "Enteignung der Weimarer Republik" jedenfalls soll es ja wohl nicht gehen. --AndreasPraefcke (talk) 10:09, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

my free translation of the above: Is that a machine translation? It is not understandable English in any case . And it has the title, "expropriation of the Weimar Republic" which does not describe it well. - 10:09, 13 April 2011 (UTC) DGG ( talk ) 03:04, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

You're right... I just wanted to test if the "author" understands a word of German, which he probably does not. I also doubt that this mess is English, that's why I asked about the machine translation. The "author" did never answer here nor on his talk page there. I still think this is an obvious candidate for deletion, since it's just not understandable.

Example: "If only the cowardly raid on the property of the defenseless princes of the principle that property is sacred, once broken, then the general socialization, follow the general expropriation of any private property soon, no matter whether they are large factories or carpentry workshop whether it is a huge department stores or Grünkramladen, whether it is an estate or a suburban garden, whether a large bank or the bank-book of a worker is there."

Trying to "correct" this mess without a working knowledge of German is impossible, it needs a complete re-translation. This would be much work. Keeping this crap would devalue the work of many users who use many hours for translating articles from de to en. I have done it, I know how much work it is. I would never try to delete an article where someone (especially a non-native speaker of English) has put in a lot of work, but did not succeed 100% in a good, readable English result. My English isn't perfect either, of course; and that's where the wiki principle can be handy and succesful. But here a user from an English-speaking country (according to his user page) put a German text through a translation machine (and a bad one, even Google gives better results; I tried that), and didn't even bother to read and edit the text before dumping it in en.wikipedia, with even a lemma he obviously did not understand. (He did the same in French Campaign in Israel, I guess, but I don't know the source). Furthermore, it was and still is a copyvio from the German article without even referencing the source while creating the article, which should and could be healed by a version import from de.wikipedia.

By the way, I think the topic itself is important enough to warrant a good en.wikipedia article, and why not a translation of the very good de.wikipedia article. But a translation into English, please. Greetings from Germany --AndreasPraefcke (talk) 08:28, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

A fun fact: have you ever heard of the German state of "lip"? (Lippe). With the former ruling royal families fought for October 1926 but still the states of Thuringia, Hesse, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Mecklenburg-Strelitz, and especially lip. --AndreasPraefcke (talk) 08:36, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

Guild of Copyeditors

I'll have a crack at translating the German article as part of the Copyedit remit - might take me a few days to work through it though. If you could leave up the "in use" tag it would be appreciated as there's no point anyone else fiddling with it in the meantime Brickie (talk) 10:51, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

I'll work on this in my sandbox - User:Brickie/Sandbox/German_Princes. Feel free to kibbitz. Brickie (talk) 12:10, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Some minor cleanup, still needs retranslation

Added a few links, and did a bit of minor cleanup for the convenience of whoever decides to translate this. Djembayz (talk) 12:22, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Major cleanup complete

Because it consisted of a (pretty ghastly) machine translation, this article was nominated at WP:VPP for worst article in Wikipedia. This machine translation has now been edited (re-translated) to produce something looking like English. It may still need some attention. Here are some of the remaining issues with the translation:

• I'm not too keen on the title (which I see as a descriptive title rather than a proper name). I believe the object of "expropriation" is correctly the thing that is taken, not the person it is taken from. I suppose it would be OK if a bad translation had become established as a technical term in English, but I'm not sure that is the case. I have mostly altered this in the text.
• The terms used for taking property may be a problem.
  • As I understand it "Enteignung" does not necessarily imply "without compensation" but "expropriation" does. This is not a problem with the actual referendum since it is clear that it was intended to be without compensation; however it may be a problem in some parts of the text. I believe confiscation also implies "without compensation".
  • I take "Beschlagnahme" to mean something like taking away possession or control (but not ownership) and have translated this as "seize". Of course, we are mainly talking about land. Any lawyers out there might like to comment.
  • I think I used "nationalisation" once to include the state's taking ownership (with or without compensation), though the political body involved is a (constituent) state rather than a nation. Somebody might have a better idea on that.
  • I also used "dispossession", which I am not too keen on.
• We could probably do with some more images. I commented out one image showing the process because it contained quite a lot of German text. Someone who is more into graphics might like to convert that into English. If so, I can provide a translation of the text.
• The reference formatting etc. could probably do with improving.
• We could do with more English references. I have added the English translations of Mommsen's and Kolb's books but, of course not changed the references. Someone with access to the English translations might like to alter the references to refer to the English editions.
• The many quotations are a problem. In some cases I have changed them to indirect reported speech. The translations of direct speech should probably be changed to include the original German in a footnote, but it's a bit awkward because of partial quotations.
• Now we have a translation, we could think about any changes needed for an English-speaking readership.
• I have not read all the references; so strictly speaking, I suppose, one should add "as cited at the German Wikipedia article" but one can overdo it and there is a template on the talk page referring to the German original. Anyway, I've mentioned it here, so that should get round any charges of "citation plagiarism".

Although there's still some work to do, I'll remove the tags. Then we'll know that any new tags apply to the current version.

The German article is FA status, so it would be cool if we could get the English version up to a similar standard. Any comments welcome.
--Boson (talk) 16:31, 1 June 2012 (UTC)