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I am trying to build a blog home page with the usual list of article excerpts, where the excerpt contains a read more link to the complete article.

In english a read more link might look like:

Continue reading “article title”

or

read more

and similar variants.

The possible German translations (and variants):

  • Weiterlesen
  • Weiterlesen “article title”
  • Hier weiterlesen “article title”
  • Weiter geht es hier

sound weird to me, and I am German :-) .

[UPDATE] To get an impression why I have the strange feeling with the German "solutions" just grab a screenreader and open a site like spiegel.de, when the text is spoken out loud, the "mehr" just doesn't feel right, in contrast the English "continue reading ..." sounds natural for me.

In a book you might find a variation of "lesen Sie weiter auf Seite xx", that does feel natural and fits to the medium, I try to find a natural sounding solution for a blog (digital medium) too

Are there more and hopefully (semantically) better alternatives ?

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1  
Weird? What's wrong with "weiterlesen"? I've seen it everywhere in WordPress blogs e.g. DIE “WEITERLESEN”-FUNKTION. Sounds perfect to me and I am not German! – user508 Mar 14 '12 at 0:28
the strange feeling comes especially from speaking the text out loud (or take a screenreader), in english the continue reading just sounds natural and connects to the excerpt, in german "weiterlesen" does not connect (for me) – Michael Lange Mar 14 '12 at 7:10
Just Weiter (example) and you can also just use the headline as link. – Em1 Mar 14 '12 at 8:14
I have a hard time understanding why "weiterlesen" is worse than "continue reading". What is so natural about the latter? For a blind person both phrases should apply equally good/bad. – musiKk Mar 14 '12 at 12:11
for me - in german - weiterlesen sounds strange, out of context and disconnected from the preceding excerpt, it might be the same for the english version (for a native speaker), but it is not for me – Michael Lange Mar 14 '12 at 15:48

1 Answer

up vote 6 down vote accepted

Weiterlesen ...

is the best of your alternatives and is used for example in Mambo/Joomla CMS in German.

Alternatively, you can use

Mehr ...

which is often used in German online news pages (e.g. Spiegel Online).

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thanks for the "Mehr" variant, but as said in an above comment, my "weird" impression comes from speaking the text out loud (or use a screenreader) and the feeling that the - often used - german solution does not "connect" to the text – Michael Lange Mar 14 '12 at 7:12

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