German genre translations?

After diving deep into “Folk” in the translations, I think we need an expert on musical genres here to help us draw the line between Folk and Volksmusik.
Loads of other funny translations to be fixed, though. :wink:

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btw, for everyone wondering, “Enge Lage, enge Stellung” is the automatic translation of “Close Harmony” :sunglasses:

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@suedkiez @Kopftelefon

As Mike wrote:

I would keep it simple and would in any doubt keep the English naming, which most Germans would use and understand anyway - at least for the wide area of Rock / Pop music.

This may be completely different in Classical Music (= “Klassik”) - so here someone may get involved who is active in this musical area - I have no clue here at all …

My dear native english speakers, how do you attribute the genre “Hymns”? Does it include national anthems in english (which would be “Hymnen” in german), or is it strictly used for songs sung in church (which would be “Kirchenlieder”)?

Classical is looking much better already in the translation tool after looking through the first few pages. It’s much easier, too, because straight translations work most of the time and the whole cultural pop complications don’t exist.

There’s already one conundrum though, there is a form:Songs and a form: Lieds and both are translated as Lieder. Difficult to say without context. In classical, Songs would always be Lieder, but in Pop, Songs are probably better left as Songs. And I can’t tell for sure what form:Songs refers to - but I guess most likely classical, so Lieder is fine

I think we need to be careful to separate two distinct discussions:

  • The contents of the Roon genre hierarchy, and how those genres are organized hierarchically and applied to albums and artists
  • How the names of those genres are localized for display in different languages

On the first point I have a lot of thoughts and I would love to improve our genres at some future date. I think the current genre hierarchy is pretty US-centric and I think we could do better… but it’s not a simple project, particularly in a world where people have been editing these genres and classifying the music in their libraries for years.

Any changes we make would need to take the ongoing effort of our users into consideration and ensure we’re improving this part of the product without disrupting how people organize their music.

So, for now, we’re really only discussing the 2nd point.

I understand there’s some subtlety here around what “folk” means in German, versus “Volksmusik” – interesting stuff and I’d love to hear more! – but for now I think you need to assume we’re not changing the contents or definition of these genres, beyond how their name is displayed in Roon.

If it’s clearer for Germans to continue calling that “Folk” that’s probably the right decision. A Korean translator might decide otherwise, but that’s the beauty of the system!

Ultimately we’re hoping Roon users around the world can discuss these questions right here on this site and come to consensus about the right display names. Feedback about changing the definition of genres (as opposed to how they’re displayed) is great too, but I want to be clear that that’s harder to take immediate action on.

Thanks again for all the questions and feedback folks! Any more questions, let me know.

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There’s an old thread in the Translations-subforum where we could discuss specific translations:

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I need a break and food :slight_smile:

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Either credit role autotranslations are better or someone has made themselves busy already :+1: so progress is faster now

First pass done. I’ll do another quick one to clean up a few terms for consistency, then I’ll leave any detail work to someone else - there are some ambiguous ones where one needs to see the genres/credits/albums/artists in context. (See the translation thread)

Edit: OK I’m done with the consistency pass. This is surely not complete but I did my best with terms that jumped into my eye. Together with the work done by @Kopftelefon and I guess some others, I’m at least confident it’s not an embarrassment when released.

:smoking::smoking::smoking:

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Despite the Dutch language has many similarities with the German language, I had it a bit easier with genre translations because the Dutch have adopted a lot of words / terms from English.
With regard to the Folk genre I just left all Folk from English speaking countries as Folk and others as Volksmuziek (= Dutch)…

We German editors did the same with Folk/Volksmusik and left much in English as well, but there was a lot to fix nevertheless :slight_smile:

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Same here.

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Hymns are songs of praise.

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Thank you!