[jan_Inkepa]

Don't German UI conventions follow the convention of using infinitive verbs for commands normally? ('öffnen' instead of 'öffne'?) [the only exception I know is the adjective "rückgängig" for "undo" ]

Though even there your point still stands - they can be easily distinguished from the perfect form ('opened' (geöffnet) vs 'to open' (öffnen) ). So I guess I'm nit-picking a bit.

[manuel_w]

Native german speaker here.

Have no clue about UI conventions nor grammar, but I'd expect either "Öffne Ticket" or "Ticket öffnen". "Öffnen Ticket" is wrong, just as "Ticket öffne".

I suppose the Flixbus app was made by native German speakers coding in English language. That would explain why they chose "open ticket" rather than "view ticket" or similar. As some of the parent posts said, you also "open files" here, so they probably just did what they assumed is right.

Denglish (Deutsch-Englisch) is full of this.

Happened to me as well; for most of my life I used "eventually" incorrect, thinking it means "maybe".

  * German "eventuell" = English "maybe"
  * German "schlussendlich" = Englisch "eventually", "at last"

[yarcob]

Oh yes, word order is also a major problem in software translated to German. You can tell when an English speaker programmed something...

It annoyed me more than it should that Word for Mac for years had a menu command "Beenden Word" (Quit Word) where the order of the words was obviously hard coded...

Or how Siri says "In 50 Meter Sie haben Ihr Ziel erreicht." (it should be "In 50 Meter haben Sie Ihr Ziel erreicht")

In English you can just take the sentence "You have arrived at your destination" and prefix it with something like "In 50 yards", and it's a perfectly valid sentence: "In 50 yards you have arrived at our destination". It might sound a bit mechanical, but it's not wrong.

If you do the same in German, it just sounds very confusing and wrong.

[jamespwilliams]

I’ve noticed a few other German-English anomalies in my time around German people. First is “some-” instead of “any-”. Second is the use of “since”, e.g: “I’ve been working here since 8 years”. Present tense confusion - e.g: “I’m having” instead of “I have” - my understanding is that in German there is only one present tense, whereas English has a few subtly different ones, so it’s not surprising that some confusion ensues. “Driving a bike” is always funny. Saying “with X years” instead of “aged X years”.

In all of those cases it’s still obvious what the person means. And to be clear I don’t mean to pick on anyone here, I just find the language differences interesting. Far be it from me to judge - I can barely speak one language, let alone two.

[1986]

English has borrowed so many words from so many other languages that there are false friends everywhere. As a native English speaker and German learner, it took me a minute to get over the same thing with "aktuell" - yes, of course I want the actual news!

[mappu]

Many many years ago, trying to learn German as an english speaker, i was taught Maybe (EN) -> Wehrscheinlich (DE) -

Is that correct? If it's even remotely close to being correct, it definitely makes sense pedagogically to avoid the ambiguity.

[1986]

I learned:

- maybe = vielleicht

- probably = wahrscheinlich

- definitely = bestimmt

But a big part of the gap between being able to speak in a language and being able to comprehend a language is that there are often plenty of ways to communicate/translate the same concept. It's much easier for a learner to say "vielleicht" every time they mean to indicate "maybe" than it is for a learner to learn that "vielleicht", "eventuell", "möglicherweise", etc. all basically map to the concept of "maybe" (which of course conceptually maps to its own set of English words - "maybe", but also "perhaps", "possibly", etc.).

It gets even hairier because word choice is highly culture-bound and the semantics are not guaranteed to be the same as the top dictionary definition. "Could you maybe take a look at this?" is not really asking someone to "maybe" take a look, the asker definitely wants them to take a look, it's just a construction that carries a deferential tone.

[yarcob]

Oops, you are right, now that I think about it it would be weird to see a button labelled "öffne" instead of "öffnen".

I just thought that it was unlikely that the verb/adjective confusion comes from German->Italian translation, it's more likely from English->Italian.

It's a common mistake that I've already seen in software translated from English to German as well, it's just what happens when you translate English strings without context.