"Aye aye, captain."

The "ayes" (the "yeses"), not the "eyes". Die meisten haben "Ja" gesagt. Or something like that.

W

What you see is what you get.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG

Scott hat wohl recht, dass es ursprünglich "the ayes have it" hieß, aber die Umwidmung auf *eyes* (oft mit einer Bedeutung in Richtung Optiker/Retina-Scan usw.) scheint inzwischen noch populärer

In dem mir vorliegenden Text heißt es: "The eyes have it", nicht "The AYES have it", Irrtum ausgeschlossen! Der letztgenannte Ausdruck steht sogar in meinem mittelmäßig umfangreichen Wörterbuch, dafür hätte ich das Forum hier nicht behelligen müssen, aber was die Abwandlung/Verballhornung mit "EYES" betrifft, tappe ich bedeutungs- und übersetzungsmäßig völlig im Dunklen. In welchen Zusammenhängen benutzt man "The eyes have it", und was will man damit ausdrücken?

Aus dem (zugegebenermaßen dürftigen) Gesamtzusammenhang erschließt sich lediglich, dass es etwas mit Wahrnehmung und Sehen zu tun haben muss.

 

 

If it really is "the eyes" and not "the ayes", then the author made a mistake. It really doesn't have any meaning as far as I'm aware. (US-native speaker).

This is a word-play that has been around for a long time. When I was a kid it used to infuriate me because I couldn't make any sense of it. Of course the original is "the ayes have it" (i.e. those who vote in favour win), but in the context of advertising (e.g. spectacles, contact lenses, eye shadows, eye creams, etc.) it is obviously very popular to play on the homophone "eyes" - "ayes".

e.g. "The eyes have it at Snoopy's Spectacles. Choose from our great selection of designer glasses."

A google search on the phrase results in 714,000 (!) hits. In my opinion, it is highly improbable that all these authors are mistaken. And advertising is by far not the only context in which it is used. The Internet Movie Database, for instance, lists seven different movies titled "The Eyes Have It," the earliest ist from 1928, the most recent from 1973. So it seems that the phrase has been around in the English language for quite some time now.

Still I can't make heads or tails of it, let alone come up with a German translation, which is getting more and more urgent now.

Pons-Collins, Oxford-Duden:
the ayes have it - die Mehrheit ist dafür

To the best of my knowledge, it really is not an idiom at all, just a pun, however long it's been around. And puns are notoriously hard to translate.

The point in your text seems to be that both slogans are clichéd phrases used to promote things that appeal to the eye, that are visually attractive (because of their clean style, user-friendly layout, etc.). If you could think of two similar sayings using words like 'eye' and 'see' in German, it might be better just to substitute them instead of translating the English ones.

But since 'the eyes have it' isn't really all that familiar -- I had certainly never come across it, regardless of how many web hits it gets -- maybe you could also just translate a typical phrase expressing a vote of confidence and substitute 'eyes,' if that would be understandable enough. I don't suppose you could live with something as uninspired as 'Die Augen sind dafür'?