Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Naming of German municipal subdivisions


While browsing through articles on subdivisions of Cologne with the intention of adding translations from German Wikipedia, I noticed that the terms used to translate different levels of subdivision are inconsistent across these pages. The overview article Districts of Cologne translates Stadtbezirk as "(city) district", and Stadtteil very literally as "city part". Articles about individual Stadtbezirke on the other hand, like Lindenthal and Rodenkirchen instead render Stadtbezirk as "borough" and Stadtteil as either "(city) quarter" "city part".

By way of comparison, articles on Berlin, which calls its top-level subdivisions Bezirk and its second-level subdivisions Ortsteil (which meanings do not differ substantially from Stadtbezirk and Stadtteil), uses "borough" for the former and "locality" for the latter.

This is confusing in several different ways:

  • Readers may take a minute to work out that what some articles call a "borough" is the same thing other articles call a "district".
  • The literal translation "city part" for Stadtteil sounds vague and doesn't really convey any scale or significance to the reader. It also sounds a bit "awkward" to my mind. The term "locality" used for Ortsteil is less awkward, but no less vague.
  • The use of "quarter" for Stadtteil is wholly nonsensical as the Stadtteile themselves can be further subdivided informally into German: (Stadt)viertel / Kölsch: Veedel, which literally translates as..."(city) quarter". Berlin articles use "neighbourhood" for such further, informal subdivisions of their Ortsteile.

I would like to propose the following consistent approach for the subdivisions of German cities:

  • (Stadt)bezirk or other top-level division to be rendered as borough
  • Stadt-/Ortsteil or other second-level division to be rendered as district
  • Viertel or other (usually informal) third-level division to be rendered as neighbourhood except in proper nounsnote (e.g. Severinsviertel → "Severin Quarter", Belgisches Viertel → "Belgian Quarter")

Subjectively, as a binative of English and German, this is what seems most intuitively comprehensible/evocative, but there are also objective reasons speaking for it:

  1. The City of Cologne's official web page on its subdivisions alongside this official map of Veedel uses precisely this borough-district-neighbourhood schema while retaining "quarter" for proper nouns (example)
  2. Berlin likewise officially uses "boroughs" for Bezirke and "districts and neighbourhoods" for Ortsteile and their subdivisions
  3. The borough-district schema has also been used for translating Stockholm's top-level stadsdelsområden and second-level stadsdelar, the latter even being cognate with Stadtteile.

However, I didn't want to charge ahead and make these changes without first inviting comment to see if there might be any good reasons this isn't already what's used across the board. So...what do other editors think? --Newbiepedian (talk · C · X! · L) 12:13, 18 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

^Note: "Quarter" is problematic as a generic term, as this could be misinterpreted; "X is a quarter of Cologne" could be taken to mean that X accounts for a literal quarter of Cologne's area/population. Such misinterpretation isn't likely in proper nouns, which is why it makes sense (to my mind) to retain it there for the sake of "authenticity" (for want of a better term).