Translating cactus descriptions - A to L

I would like to thank Ulrich Creutzburg and Rico Kolodzey for checking and correcting the German translations, Nikkel Reinhoud and Paul Klaassen for providing the Dutch translation, Lubomir Berka and Jan Martin Jecmínek, M.D. for the the Czech, José Manuel Sánchez de Lorenzo Cáceres for providing the Spanish translation. Special thanks go to K. Trout for completely overhauling the entire list of words, adding new words and phrases, and adding all of the French. Many thanks guys, your presence makes the web a better place.

This document is really only meant to enable those people, like myself, who cannot fluently read non-English languages, to get a rough translation of most descriptions of cacti sp. And for that reason only the most often encountered terms used in the formal descriptions of plants have been included. To translate detailed texts, a decent dictionary will be required. I have personally been using the "Collins German-English dictionary", ISBN 0-06-275501-3 and "Collins Spanish-English dictionary", ISBN 0-00-470965-9

Recently I have switched to using OCR software to scan text and then using a piece of translation software to do all of the hard work. Once the programs dictionary has been updated to include cactus specific terms, the translation process is a much shorter one.

The most important things to remember when using software to do the translation are:

1. If using a flatbed scanner, make sure the glass surface is clean.
2. If the source document is printed on thin paper, or text or pictures show through on the final scan, place a piece of thin, dark coloured card behind the document.
3. Make sure you scan at a high enough resolution, I generally use 300 dpi. This should be more than adequate for scanning most journals, books, etc. If the source document is old or of poor quality then the resolution may need to be increased.
4. If the source document is on discoloured paper, from a photocopy, due to age, etc, then try to get the scanning software to increase the brightness until an accurate scan is received.
5. Make sure the OCR program recognises all of the accented characters, such as ä, ß, é, etc that are found in your document.

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

Taxonomic abbreviations encountered in German texts:

• Ar.=Areolen
• Bl.=Blüten
• Dm.=Durchmesser
• Fr.=Frucht
• Frkn.=Fruchtknoten (Ovarium)
• Gr.=Griffel
• Krbl.=Kronblätter (Hüllblätter, Petalen, Korolle)
• Mst.=Mittelstacheln
• Nb.=Narbe
• N.-K.=Nektarkammer
• N.-R.=Nektarrinne
• Ri.=Rippen
• Rö.=Röhre, Blütenröhre (Receptaculum)
• Rst.=Randstacheln
• Sa.=Samen
• St.=Stacheln (Dornen)
• Stbbl.=Staubblätter (Stamina)
• Stbf.=Staubfäden (Filamente)

Notes on German spelling

• ae is also spelled ä
• oe is also spelled ö
• ue is also spelled ü
• ß is often rendered as -ss or as -sz if ß-character is not available
• Older works often use "th" in some words that modern works use "t"
• Lack of diacritics or another rendering as indicated above is considered a misspelling
• Similarly, nouns are capitalized in German. If not capitalized this is a misspelling or is a different word or has a different meaning.

Further notes

1. cactus, cacti (cactuses, as plural, is now considered acceptable but represents an ignorant dumbing down of the English language and should be discouraged. Will we next be accepting alumnuses and spaghettos?
2. now both lanceate and lanceolate are generally considered synonymous with lance-shaped.

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