Talk:Abgeltungsteuer

Title and wikilinks are wrong

The title of the article does not conform to naming guidelines at WP:AT; we do not use parenthetical disambiguation to encode a foreign title; wikidata links and wikilinks in the article can handle this.

Secondly, all the partentheticals in the article which link directly to German Wikipedia should not be styled that way, either. Instead, template {{ill}} should be used. So, instead of

...only half the amount of income tax and solidarity surcharge ([[:de:Solidaritätszuschlag|Solidaritätszuschlag]]).}}

...only half the amount of income tax and solidarity surcharge (Solidaritätszuschlag).

say,

...only half the amount of income tax and {{ill|German solidarity surcharge|de|Solidaritätszuschlag|lt=solidarity surcharge}}.

...only half the amount of income tax and solidarity surcharge.

(after doing whatever research is needed to establish a likely article name for the non-existent equivalent article on en-wiki, which goes in the first param of template {{ill}}). Mathglot (talk) 02:10, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

Areas like law and finance can be very specialized and not correspond very well to foreign systems, and thus be very difficult to translate. I have seen all of the following as translations of Abgeltungsteuer:

• flat rate withholding tax (currently a redirect to this article)
• final withholding tax
• Flat tax (existing article, but much too generic a phrase to use as a translation of Abgeltungsteuer)
• Flat withholding tax
• flat savings tax
• withholding tax on dividends and capital gains
• Capital Yield Tax
• Withholding Tax
• withholding tax on capital gains

But, imho, none of them quite do the trick. (Besides the fact that you'd have to prefix them with 'German' imho.) Here's a definition of Abgeltungsteuer from www.abgeltungssteuer-2009.de:

The Abegeltungsteuer is a tax introduced on 1 January 2009, which is levied on all capital gains.

If it were my call, I would name the article German capital gains withholding tax. Mathglot (talk) 03:23, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

Notes

Article title

This is difficult. I agree that the current title needs changing because we do not normally include the translation as a means of disambiguation in the title. I agree that the title should include "German", as a means of achieving precision. The term Abgeltunssteuer should obviously be included (and bolded) in the first line. I do not agree with using the tentatively suggested term "capital gains … tax", because the tax also applies to other income from capital, such as interest and dividends. At least as currently written, this is about the tax on private income, so the meaning of Abgeltungsteuer as opposed to the more inclusive Kapitalertragssteuer ("capital returns tax"?) is important', as currently expressed as "flat-rate" (i.e. it does not in principle depend on the taxpayer's individual tax rate). I'm not sure if the term "withholding tax" ("Quellensteuer"?) should be used, since the flat-rate tax might be applied even when not taxed at source (though the article should state prominently that it is normally withheld). At the moment, we have statements like "The flat rate withholding tax is levied as a withholding tax." What about German flat-rate tax on income from capital? --Boson (talk) 07:27, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

Although I'm generally keen to translate foreign words, it only makes sense if there's a clear and commonly used or accepted English equivalent. I'm no expert in legal terminology, but in this case it doesn't sound as if there is a clear English term. So I'd suggest just using the German term as the title and explaining it in the lede. --Bermicourt (talk) 16:04, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

Since the article is about the specific (so-called) Abgeltungsteuer in Germany, not the tax in general like de:Abgeltungsteuer, should that be Abgeltungssteuer (Germany)? Otherwise the definition (Abgeltungsteuer is a German flat tax on private income from capital and capital gains) would need to be changed.--Boson (talk) 17:07, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

Bermicourt, imho your suggestion is totally the way to go here imho, and I don't know why I didn't see that right away. When you have to tie yourself into knots to come up with a proper title for a translated article and it still isn't quite right because the other language just doesn't have the exact equivalent, that's a darn good reason to stay with the foreign term and just explain it in the lead. And sticking with the foriegn term also perfectly ensures precision and takes care of any disambig issues.

Boson, good point; I think it only makes sense to keep this article about the same concept as the German one, which is the more general term, which means broadening the topic in English to include not only the German law, as it does now, but also the Austrian And Letzebuergisch one as well. I don't think it makes sense to have an article just about the German law. So yes, the first sentence would have to change. Or rather, we would write a brand new lead for the broader article concept, create three new H2 sections #Germany, #Austria, and #Luxembourg and move most of the current body of the article into the first one, and either fill out the other two sections, or add {{empty section}} templates to those sections and template {{Expand German}} to the top.

As far as title styling: since Abgeltungsteuer is a foreign term that is not considered adopted into English and requires italics in running text, the title would be an italic title, which is accomplished by using {{italic title}} at the top of the page.

Perhaps some of the other terms listed above as red links (which ones?) should become redirects to this article, based on actual usage in the English-speaking press (linguee, google books, and articles about Abgeltungsteuer in the eu domain that have 'English' translation links will help there). To the extent that those redirect terms are used in a natural way as part of the definition in the first sentence of the article here, those terms would be bolded in the lead or elsewhere in the article as well and employ {{R from alternative name}} at the redirect page, and some of the redirects (to the extent that they only applied to German or some other national Abgeltungsteuer) would employ {{R to section}} on their respective redirect pages.

So if we go with Abgeltungsteuer as the title, then Boson's proposed first sentence would simply move to section #Germany and we'd develop a new first sentence corresponding to the broader article topic, using de:Abgeltungsteuer as a guide, and maybe employing some of those red-linked terms?

If we have agreement on broadening the topic to include all countries and a section to cover Germany and the others, then we can wait a decent interval for more responses and then make a title move to Abgeltungsteuer in a week or two. Thoughts? Mathglot (talk) 01:27, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

I found this site helpful for thinking about some of these terms: zbw.eu. It made me realize that some of the redlinks above rather than becoming redirects, should probably be disambig pages. Mathglot (talk) 02:30, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

@Bermicourt and Boson:As of today, the article has been renamed to Abgeltungsteuer, and the old title, Flat rate withholding tax (Abgeltungsteuer) is now a redirect.

In addition, I've made some structural improvements including changing the scope of the article per Boson's 17:07, 9 July comment to all countries that use it, and some renamed and new section header titles. The scope change required adding a new H2 section header #Germany to contain all previous content about the law. I also added empty section headers #Austria and #Luxembourg as well, to contain content t.b.a. I also started going through the article to fix some of the very stiff, or incorrect, translation, but so far only in the former "History" section, now entitled #Earlier tax law.

Please have a look and see what you think, and feel free to dive in to the article and just improve it some more, or make suggestions/comments/criticisms here, if you'd rather. Mathglot (talk) 07:03, 11 August 2017 (UTC)

Not to complicate the issue of the article title even further, but I just noticed that Wikidata item Q137950, which is currently named "Flat rate withholding tax", links to German article de:Kapitalertragsteuer (Deutschland) and formerly linked to en-wiki Abgeltungsteuer as well, until I just unlinked it. The German section of the description section lists Abgeltungsteuer and Kapitalabgeltungsteueras synonyms of Kapitalertragsteuer. (I linked en-wiki Abgeltungsteuer to Q320243 (de:Talk:Abgeltungsteuer) instead.) Mathglot (talk) 06:25, 12 August 2017 (UTC)

Links to German Wikipedia

I agree that the direct links to German Wikipedia should be removed and temporarily replaced by use of {{Interlanguage link}}, as suggested. This is what the template was designed for. --Boson (talk) 07:27, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

Took a first crack at this. Adding these requires coming up with posited article titles for each of the links on the en-wiki side, and these haven't undergone any discussion, so I took my best shot without delving into it, so could use review, or maybe could just wait till someone wants to create the article (if ever). I also made liberal use of param |lt= to keep the running text flowing smoothly, where I think the article titles underlying the red links on en-wiki will probably all be "German XYZ procedure" or "German ABC tax" but you don't want the word "German" every time in the text here, hence the lt param usage. Mathglot (talk) 00:17, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

Parenthetical decomposition of title word in lead sentence

I've asked for help at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Lead section regarding the parenthetical description in the lead sentence breaking down the German compound word "Abgeltungsteuer" at this discussion. Mathglot (talk) 06:01, 13 August 2017 (UTC)