u:
> I think like Muri and flapflap that "Persistenz" or even
> "Persistenzspeicher" in German sound waaay too technical, and might even
> be ununderstandable per se. It's not a word one could look up on the
> internet when being stuck, as then one would find the german term
> "Persistenz" on Wikipedia which describes something entirely different.
>
> So the correct German translation that carries the exact meaning is
> indeed 'verschlüsselter beständiger Speicherbereich' or 'beständiger
> Speicher' if we want to shorten it to a maximum, loosing a bit of meaning.
>
> So one question would be: if the technical writers decide to use
> "Persistence" in English, should there be a guideline to translate it
> correctly to other languages? And if yes, where, and who takes care of
> implementing it?
I think that each translation team should maintain a translation
glossary for all these more technical terms. This is not specific to the
terminology around Persistence and the same applies to MAC spoofing, Tor
bridges, proxy, privacy, cookies, etc.
> Now, as far as the English term is concerned I feel like "the
> Persistence" as a nounification of an adjective might also be something
> which obscures technical understanding, as it's basically branding,
> like in the examples you gave (Dropbox, Nextcloud). I personally don't
> like this much, but I'm happy to be convinced that it works. Hence I
> believe that it would be useful to do user testing using the term in the
> documentation with native speakers and also people who are not native
> speakers but want to run Tails in English and then see how many of them
> understand it, with documentation, without documentation, in any other
> setting. Is this part of your plan, or do you trust that it will be
> understandable per se by people who don't know Tails yet for example?
Until now I've tested the future content in English with 5 people who
were not native English speakers and had diverse English levels:
1 Catalan, 2 Chinese, 1 Arabic. Saying "persistent storage" or
"persistent volume" instead of "Persistence" only would not have made
any real difference for any of these people. Cody discussed this with
several people both English and non-English native speakers.
We'll do more tests once we have mockups of the illustrations and I'll
most likely test it again with non-native English speakers.
--
sajolida
Tails —
https://tails.boum.org/
UX · Fundraising · Technical Writing
