German with foils

Can you give us an idea of the context? A list of languages being offered at a school, a list of foreign language fonts available for download, etc.?

<blockquote>Quote
<hr>foil - picture consisting of a positive photograph or drawing on a transparent base; viewed with a projector
transparency
--ikon, picture, icon, image - a visual representation (of an object or scene or person or abstraction) produced on a surface; "they showed us the pictures of their wedding"; "a ---movie is a series of images projected so rapidly that the eye integrates them"
--lantern slide, slide - a transparency mounted in a frame; viewed with a slide projector
--viewgraph, overhead - a transparency for use with an overhead projector<hr></blockquote>I found a few postings in Usenet about it.<blockquote>Quote
<hr>This is about terms in the context of overhead projection.
Germans tend to use the word 'foil' when they should use 'slide' or 'transparency'. The reason is that 'foil' just sounds too similar to the German 'Folie', which (among other things) means 'slide' or 'transparency'. <hr></blockquote>I also found a usenet post where a Danish speaker posted "I wouldn't be surprised to hear it called an "overhead" in English too, though I guess "slide" or "foil" is more common. " The response was pretty overwhelming that "foil" was rare in English. Another thread said that "foil" was in-house IBM jargon for "slides" and one person said that "foil" was used in Pennsylvania.

That's interesting. I have definitely heard Germans saying Dias or Diapositive in English, but never heard them using foils before. Curious to see what other posters say.

HHmmm, I am trying to put this information in context but cannot quite get there.

DianaHaddad, I manage localization of keyboards(new project for me). This list of languages is for the keyboard legend for different countries. So, I'm gathering that there is a German keyboard and a German keyboard w/foils. I just don't know what "foils" means regarding the German language or German keyboard.

I'm trying to find the differences, but the people around me do not know.

Interesting.

I have no idea. I did find a reference to two types of German keyboards (Swiss and German/Austrian) but I still don't see how "foils" comes out of that.

<blockquote>Quote
<hr>A German keyboard (see photo) has a QWERTZ layout, i.e., the Y and Z keys are reversed in comparison with the U.S.-English QWERTY layout. In addition to the normal letters of the English alphabet, German keyboards add the three umlauted vowels and the "sharp-s" characters of the German alphabet. The "ess-tsett" (ß) key is to the right of the "0" (zero) key. (But this letter is missing on a Swiss-German keyboard, since the "ß" is not used in the Swiss variation of German.) The u-umlaut (ü) key is located just to the right of the "P" key. The o-umlaut (ö) and a-umlaut (ä) keys are on the right of the "L" key. This means, of course, that the symbols or letters that an American is used to finding where the umlauted letters are now, turn up somewhere else. A touch-typist is starting to go nuts now, and even a hunt-and-peck person is getting a headache.

<hr></blockquote>

Bingo! It's that "Folie" thing again.

I'm having a bit of trouble putting it all together, but someone on eBay was selling keyboard foils which were overlays to change the keys on the keyboard--to use Diana's example, to turn the "Y" key into a "Z" key. That way, after yo used software to reconfigure the keys, you can look at the keys and see the right letter.

A Picture of the foils

Or, there is such a thing as "front foils" on a keyboard. If you have a membrane keyboard, the front foil is the overlay that has the keys marked on it.

Back to the initial suggestion of "foils" for transparencies (and a bit off topic now): do Germans really use the word in that context? I thought they said "sheets", like Dutch speakers do. (And if they are digital they are projected by beamers of course.)

I've heard my German language teacher calling them 'Folie'....