A first look at the German corpus by gender

[matthias]

@alberto

Of course, it is not necessary to record the German name for [a code with an English-only label], as long as we are reasonably sure that there are no special connotations to the German word (presumably used by informants) that are missing from the English translation.

Words from code names are not necessarily found in texts by informants Code names also do not define a code – rather, the description does. The multi-lingual code labeling system is only meant to aid ethnographers who do not speak English, or do not speak it well. (Even then, they have to understand the code descriptions to apply codes correctly, and these descriptions are so far only available in English.)

In total, multi-lingual code names have probably not served us well, as they introduce complexity, making it harder to keep the database tidy.

@alberto

There are 206 codes with no English label, only a German label. Some of those labels are, correctly, German expressions (example: von dem Staat verlassen). I can easily make Tulip copy those labels into the field for English labels, but the problem remains in the database. […] Not sure about how to solve the labeling inconsistencies. @matthias, is it worth going by API call?

Codes with only non-English names are allowed in the database, as that would be their initial state after being created by non-English-speaking ethnographers, and before being translated by their colleagues. For those cases, using these non-English names as fallback options when determining a code’s display name (as in your example code) would be a good approach. Open Ethnographer uses similar fallback mechanisms for determining display names in some cases.

But, an English code name in the field for a German code name is an inconsistency. Inconsistencies should be fixed in the database, not with Tulip code. We have the Translate View in Open Ethnographer to let ethnographers fix these inconsistencies efficiently, and also to add missing translations efficiently. (In the Open Ethnographer code list, use the “Discourse Tag” and “Creator” filters to select a suitable code subset, then choose “View: Translate” in the top right. With the Translate View, you always translate between English code names and code names in your preferred language; adapt your preferred language in your Open Ethnographer user preferences if needed.)

Speaking of inconsistencies, I saw some stuff that I’d rather not expect in Open Ethnographer data and that should probably be fixed:

• Some topics, including from POPREBEL, are coded but are not assigned to any corpus via a Discourse tag (example).

• There is a Discourse tag ethno-poprebel and another one ethno-rebelpop. What’s up with the latter? Similarly, there is both ethno-poprebel-german-interviews and ethno-rebelpop-deutsch-interviews and so on.