I wanted to find out what ‘volksentscheid’ is (saw videos celebrating it in Berlin) but Google Translate decided to fail me

5 comments

  2. Google translate is great to get a rough idea what some text in a foreign language is about, but otherwise it’s rather limited …

    You need to look at the original text to understand any machine translation.

    For example, “a **referendum** is used synonymously for **referendum**” is translated from “ein **Volksentscheid** wird synonym für **Referendum** verwendet”. So German has two words (one of Germanic origin, one of Latin origin), while English only has the one of Latin origin. And you can’t expect computer translation to figure that out, without understanding the sentence.

    And German even has a third word, “Bürgerentscheid” (“decision by citizens”), which refers to municipal referendums. Which explains the confusion in the last sentence.

    That said, a Volksentscheid/Bürgerentscheid/Referendum is a direct vote about some issue, done by the population, not by some political institution, and for simplicity often executed together with an election. That’s it. So [referendum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendum) is the correct equivalent for all the words German uses.

  3. Basically, “Volksentscheid”, “Bürgerentscheid” and “Referendum” can all be translated into English as “referendum”.

    A “Referendum” is when voters get to vote on a law proposed by the government. A “Volksentscheid” or a “Bürgerentscheid” is a vote on a proposal put *to* the government by the people. The difference is that a “Volksentscheid” happens at the state level which has the capacity to enact legislation, while a “Bügerentscheid” happens at the district or municipal level and doesn’t involve legislation (for example, whether or not to approve a windfarm).

  4. That is not necessarily a program mistake. Some languages have several distinctly different concepts of a term in another language.

    If you really care you need to look into the judicial concepts in German.
    For a rough understanding, knowing what referendum means is just fine.

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