As a non-native German speaker I’m not all that fond of the translations either. Nor the French translations. But sorry guys - They.Are.A.Fact.Of.Life. It’s easy to say “Just work in English…” when you already know it. But that’s not the case for everyone - far from it.
Not everyone has gone to a university. Not everyone has been raised in a country/culture where learning a second, third or any other language has been encouraged. Taught in school, perhaps yes, but not generally promoted in the culture outside the classroom.
I say this from my 20+ years of being a reseller in a country that has four national languages plus English as an unofficial fifth. Most of my clients do NOT want to work in English.
And the Rhino translations are really quite good compared to some others. They put in a lot of effort to get it that way. I sell/use a plug-in for Rhino whose translations are really awful - yet most of the people here that buy the software use them anyway. They are simply more comfortable working with commands in their native language despite the poor quality of it.
Software that has commands like Rhino rely on specific terms to define specific actions. But translations between languages can rarely be just literal. Some of the translations of similar actions in other software (such as AutoCAD) have been around for many years and are thus have ended up as a defacto ‘standard’. Some languages/cultures don’t even have the same terms/concepts that English does. But most often there are terms that can imply two or more different actions, all of which happen to be different Rhino commands. In that case one needs to choose how to translate each, and the choice can be difficult.
I often use the example of Cut/Split/Trim/Divide. Cut is already reserved system-wide as Ctrl/Cmd+C, so one can’t really use that name or any of all its standard OS translations (Ausschneiden, Couper, etc.) as a Rhino command. So when you need to ‘cut’ an object into pieces (Split in English), it is translated as Teilen in German and Diviser in French. But Diviser is very close to Divide so for translating that, they use Fractionner. Interestingly Fendre - a literal French translation of Split, which you would use to describe splitting wood for example - is not used anywhere, nor is Trancher (to slice).
And Trim is worse in French. In German one uses Trimmen - which I think is just an accepted “English-ism” - but in French it is translated as Limiter - to ‘limit’. Makes some sense with single surfaces, but not with other objects. Couper cannot be used, but one could have used Tailler, Découper, Rogner, etc…
Yes, German is also difficult because of the building-block language structure that makes for very long words and often pushes the verb/action to the end. But that’s just how it is.
But I’m meandering here on a Sunday morning. To repeat, translations are essential if Rhino wants to be inclusive and widely used in non-English speaking areas. Given that, the best we can do is try to make them as good as possible, taking into account the limits described above.
