All: Inadequate German translation of “Cheat Sheet”

[fkohrt]

Disclaimer: I am not a linguist.

As a German native speaker, it repeatedly strikes me as very odd when international communities translate the term “cheat sheet” into German “Schummelzettel”. It's a very literal (and thus, not incorrect) translation, but it always feels very much “machine translated”¹ – I never heard anyone saying it. I think I first read the term in tech projects that publish these, whereas at school they were called “Spickzettel”, which is what I would suggest as a proper translation.

The two largest German dictionaries (Duden and Wahrig) both only contain Spickzettel, but not Schummelzettel. Same for the historical dictionary by the Brothers Grimm, and the DWDS contains both but documents a higher word frequency for Spickzettel than for Schummelzettel, as does the Corpora Collection Leipzig (Spickzettel vs. Schummelzettel).

¹ Though both Google Translate and DeepL translate cheat sheet to Spickzettel. According to Wiktionary, Schummelzettel could be an Austrian term.

[mine-cetinkaya-rundel]

Thank you for your comment. We do not vet the translations, but take them as submitted by the community. I'll leave this thread open for a bit in case other German speakers might chime in.

[hfrick]

So, I'm not a linguist either but also a native German speaker. I've encountered both terms but agree that the more common term overall is probably Spickzettel, both from personal experience and the choice of sources cited here.

[trichie]

Also native German Speaker. Spickzettel ist definitely the way better word.