Talk:Imperial Sovereign

Disputed title
Along with the poor translation of the article, the title is also not appropriate. For starters, we don't use the definite article, and secondly, this is en-wiki not de-wiki, and a normal descriptive title would include the word "German" in it. What the article is actually about, is the 1848 German Reich leadership question but that's a bit unwieldy for a descriptive title, and it's not clear if there's a phrase in common usage in English historiography of this period and topic.

Beyond that, it's not at clear to me why this content should have its own article, as opposed to, say, being part of the article on German Confederation, Provisorische Zentralgewalt, Unification of Germany, or German revolutions of 1848–49. Mathglot (talk) 10:24, 31 August 2017 (UTC)


 * I totally agree that the title is clumsy and doesn't convey the intent of Reichsoberhaupt. Having looked at various translations and sources, a common English term would appear to be "Imperial Sovereign" which gets across the meaning of both Reich and Oberhaupt. My suggestion is to move it to that at least for now. If we subsequently identify a more common English term then we can always move it again. Imperial Sovereign is currently a redirect to List of Star Wars characters, but isn't actually mentioned on that page, so I don't think that's a problem either. --Bermicourt (talk) 16:45, 31 August 2017 (UTC)


 * I've completed the page move per your suggestion. Following the page move, I fixed the lead sentence accordingly. In addition, there were 22 other occurrences of translations of Reichsoberhaupt in the article body, and I cleaned those up as well.
 * Could use your help reviewing that cleanup effort. This wasn't simply a rote global substitution operation as is often the case, due to the fact that in the German article for some of those 22 cases the usage was of the more formal type, analogous to a capital-P President, or a "capital-I, capital-S 'Imperial Sovereign'", but in others it was used more in a descriptive way, as in little-p "president" or where "little-i, little-s" would be more appropriate than the capitalized title phrase (or even sometimes "ruler", or "head of state", or other locutions; especially in the bullet items in the National Assembly section).  Since German nouns are capitalized of course, the determination of whether a particular case was more the formal title, or the more informal case, cannot be determined purely from the orthography, but must be done by reading the context; meaning the translation of each of the 22 occurrences must be done individually.  This means it's a judgment call; furthermore, there were a lot of them, and it's late, and I'm not going to review my change just now, but if you find any that need changing, be my guest.  (I really only wanted to change the 22 title phrase translations in that last edit, but couldn't help fixing some awful gobbledygook and mangled translations that were nearby those occurrences; no doubt there is far more of this sort of thing, but that's not what I'm asking you to look at just now, although if you've a mind to, of course that would be great.  The more I see of this, the more it looks like unedited MT, and I'm close to suggesting that the article be junked as worse than nothing and restarted from scratch, but we'll see what develops.) Mathglot (talk) 07:38, 3 September 2017 (UTC)


 * I've had a go at cleaning up the lede and first main paragraph which contained some serious errors of mistranslation, but I'm not an expert in German political history, so it may need further tweaking. I may do some more, but have quite a busy period coming up, so not sure how quickly I'll be able to progress. Bermicourt (talk) 12:47, 3 September 2017 (UTC)


 * Nicely done, thanks. Mathglot (talk) 18:32, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

Very rough translation
There are serious errors of translation in this article, which make me think it may bean unedited, or very lightly edited machine translation. Wikipedia consensus is that an unedited machine translation, left as a Wikipedia article, is worse than nothing.

I have not examined the whole article, but only noticed a few errors in passing, and only as a result of the "title clean-up" step I engaged in, following the rename of the article as noted above. But from what little I have seen so far, in its current state, the article, imho, is not worth keeping.

Hoping for the best, I note that the translation appears not to be finished, as the English article is only half the size of the German one, and the original still contains six sections that have not been translated yet. That being the case, I would urge interested contributors to attend to the problems in the translated text already present in the article, and not to attempt to translate additional material from the German article until what is here now is a reasonably accurate and faithful representation of the original, and no longer has inscrutable passages, gobbledygook, and mistranslations of fact; and to avoid at all costs leaving unedited machine-translated text in the article. Mathglot (talk) 07:59, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Hello, I am surprised that "my" article was translated, without me knowing. :-) Kind regards, Ziko (talk) 22:49, 5 January 2022 (UTC)