chemenu/instructions/german-terminology.md

type, name, description, manual

type	name	description	manual
types/instruction.md	german-terminology	Which words stay English in German KB prose, which have a settled German form, and the register the pages are written in.	true

German terminology for kb/

Reference vocabulary for kb/CONVENTIONS.md's rule that this instance's pages are written in German. The rule lives there; the word list lives here, because it is lookup material rather than a norm and would otherwise be loaded on every write.

This file belongs to the german language profile, not to the stack. An instance writing in another language deletes or replaces it - see kb-profiles.md.

Derived from translating all 248 pages on 2026-08-29. Every entry below is a decision that was made wrong at least once first - each cost a correction pass across published pages, which is why they are written down instead of re-derived.

Contents

• Stays English
• Settled German
• Field labels
• Register
• Scope

Stays English

Established technical terms are not Germanized, in prose or in headings:

GitOps · Ownership Model · Reverse Proxy · Pull Request · Publish-Subscribe · Broker · Deployment · Namespace · Cluster · Runner · Workflow · Container · Image · Volume · Secret · Token · Template · Repository · Commit · Ingress · StorageClass · Pruning · Drift · Bootstrap · Tier · Dotfile · CI/CD · Restart Policy · Network Mode · Feature

Two are worth calling out because both were translated once and had to be rolled back:

• Skill is the name of a layer of this repo (instructions/<name>/SKILL.md, .claude/skills/), not a descriptive word. Wiki-Skills, Workflow-Skills, never „Fähigkeit".
• Secret likewise - „Geheimnis" was written 96 times across 8 pages before it was caught. Secrets-Verwaltung, Secret-Injection, Cluster-Level-Secrets.

„Fähigkeit" is almost never the right word in this wiki. Capabilities - the properties of a build or runtime environment that something is routed by - stays English too: Build-Capabilities, „Runner mit bestimmten Capabilities".

Fixed phrases stay whole, neither half-translated nor fully translated:

Separation of Concerns · Single Point of Failure · Infrastructure as Code · Chicken-Egg Problem · Least Privilege · Source of Truth · Defense in Depth

„Trennung der Concerns" and „Trennung der Zuständigkeiten" both happened, from a glossary entry that offered the choice instead of making it. A list of phrases is not a list of options.

Compounds take a hyphen: Container-Image, Job-Container, Template-Variablen, Secrets-Verwaltung, YADM-Repository. Keep them short - Schriftzugriff, not „Schriftartzugriff".

Settled German

English	German	Note
reconciliation / to reconcile	Abgleich / abgleichen	Not „Abstimmung", including in compounds: Abgleichsintervall
claim	Aussage	Never „Anspruch" - that is a legal entitlement
desired state	Soll-Zustand
ownership (in prose)	Verwaltung / Zuständigkeit	But Ownership Model and Ownership-Tier(s) stay, including as a heading
built-in	-eigen (K3s-eigen)
deprecated	abgelöst
encoding	Kodierung
architectural decision	Architekturentscheidung
key principle	Grundsatz
open issues	Offene Punkte

Field labels

English	German
**Purpose:**	**Zweck:**
**Owner:**	**Verantwortlich:**
**Language/Tech:**	**Sprache/Technik:**
**Use case:**	**Anwendungsfall:**
**Author:** / **Date:** / **Raw files:** / **Type:**	**Autor:** / **Datum:** / **Raw-Dateien:** / **Typ:**
**Maintainer:**	unchanged - established, not „Pfleger"
**Features:**	unchanged
**Website:**	unchanged - „Webseite" is one page, not the site

The value after a label is not a label: **Typ:** technology keeps its schema enum, and an author name, a date or a file path is never translated.

For a label with no entry here, translate to the point and keep it short. If the English term is established in German technical usage, leave it.

Register

Factual, impersonal, Wikipedia tone - and specifically no „Sie". English source material is full of imperatives, and the obvious German rendering is the polite form, which is wrong here:

• „Use gpg --recv-key KEY_ID to import keys" → „Zum Importieren von Schlüsseln gpg --recv-key KEY_ID verwenden" - infinitive at the end, not „Verwenden Sie …".
• „Ensure the backend supports IPv6" → „Sicherstellen, dass das Backend IPv6 unterstützt". Separable verbs are joined up again.

This was by far the most common error of the migration - 182 occurrences across 43 pages, and none of them structural, so no check found them. It is the one thing to watch for when translating instructional prose.

• Quotations are never reworded, neither translated nor moved into the impersonal register.
• Buzzwords and AI filler are banned by kb/CONVENTIONS.md; the German list is there.
• Dash as -, not —.
• German number formatting only in prose („10.000 Punkte"). Never inside code, version numbers or measurements (75-85 px, 10m, 0.90).

Scope

This is about prose in kb/. What is prose and what is an identifier - titles, headings, wikilink targets, cite-ids, enum values, tags, code - is decided by kb/CONTRACT.md, not here.