Talk:List of canals in Germany

Question on translation of Schifffahrtskanal
Literally translated Schifffahrtskanal means shipping channel. Which is more or less what the English word canal means. But in most cases German seems to use the plain kanal where English would use canal.

Various authors of this article (including myself) have therefore translated Schifffahrtskanal as ship canal, which in English means a specific form of canal intended for use by sea-going ships. But I'm now beggining to wonder about this. Several of the canals listed are well inland and it seems unlikely sea-going ships would use them (the Berlin-Spandauer Schifffahrtskanal for example). And neither the English nor German articles on the most famous ship canal in Germany (the Nord-Ostsee-Kanal) use the term Schifffahrtskanal.

So can anybody help. What is a reasonable English translation of Schifffahrtskanal?. Is it just canal, or ship canal, or something different. -- Starbois (talk) 13:47, 3 June 2010 (UTC)

Which raises a bigger question
Are we perhaps guilty of over-translation in our naming of articles on German Canals.

The general practice in wp:en is to use English proper names where they are already in common usage. For example, what German speakers call the Nord-Ostsee-Kanal has the well established English name of the Kiel Canal. This has presumably been established because of that canals maritime and military importance, and Britain's historical interest in anything maritime.

However where no such well established English proper name exists, we normally use the local name. What I suspect we should not be doing is taking the German name and decomposing it into its compenents, then translating those. And I think that is what we have done here; I suspect few inland canals in Germany have well-established English names.

Anybody got any thoughts on this?. -- Starbois (talk) 11:16, 8 June 2010 (UTC)


 * I think it's good to start a discussion about this. See also WikiProject Germany/Conventions, there are several other examples of (partially) translated names there. The status of those conventions is not clear to me, I see that several of the "guidelines" are not followed, e.g. we call the Länder of Austria "state" in Wikipedia, not "province". An argument for (partially) translating names given on that page is that German uses more compound nouns than English. Maybe we should continue this discussion here: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Germany/Conventions. Markussep Talk 14:39, 8 June 2010 (UTC)