Today I wrote an email in German to tell someone the topic of their translation was practically unknown in the English-speaking world, so we needed to add a little explanation to the text. I wrote “im angelsächsischen Raum” for “in the English-speaking world” and then, as I often do, I second-guessed myself and Googled it to make sure it wasn’t a phrase I had just imagined or misremembered.
It does mean what I thought it meant, but — and here’s why I’m writing this blog post for you — some of the translations on the Linguee page are not quite right:
Neben der konsequenten Fortführung der bisherigen Strategie für Asien erweiterte PWM erfolgreich das Booking-Center-Angebot im angelsächsischen Raum.
strategy for Asia, PWM successfully expanded the range of services offered by the booking center in the Anglo-Saxon area.
Geschäfte vorantreiben, wobei insbesondere eine stärkere Präsenz im angelsächsischen Raum ganz oben auf unserer Agenda steht.
internationalization of our businesses, with particular emphasis on strengthening our presence within the Anglo-Saxon markets.
Sachwert- und Ertragswertverfahren – angeboten, wie auch das Residualverfahren und die angelsächsichen Methoden – Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) und Monte Carlo Methode – zur Ermittlung des Open Market Value (OMV).
Both the – “Classic German Method” and the Anglo-Saxon Method – Discounted Cash Flow (DCF), as also the Monte Carlo Method for establishing the Open Market Value (OMV) can be provided.
Although we sometimes use “Anglo-Saxon” in a colloquial way (e.g. WASPs or White Anglo-Saxon Protestants), these days, in English, it’s usually a specific and rather academic term referring to people who shaped the culture and government of England from ca. 500-1066. You can recognize Anglo-Saxons by their distinctive long hair and mustaches:
So the “Anglo-Saxon area” mentioned above should extend from Northumbria down to Sussex. An “Anglo-Saxon market” sounds like a place where you go to purchase barley and rough woolen tunics, and if your accountant is using the “Anglo-Saxon method” of discounted cash flow she’s probably a very old lady with a name like Æthelthryth and you should fire her and hire someone who knows how to use a computer.
The disambiguation page for “Anglo-Saxon” on Wikipedia does show the term “Anglo-Saxon world,” but if you click on it, you get redirected to “Anglosphere.”
Which brings us to today’s translation tip, which is that if you run across “der angelsächsische Raum,” you should translate it as “the English-speaking world,” “English-speaking countries” or, if you like, “the Anglosphere,” but not “the Anglo-Saxon area.”
Poor old Robert Schumann. Was I too hard on him in a previous post? He wrote a lot of good stuff, including a fine setting of Eichendorff’s Waldgespräch:
Waldgespräch means “forest conversation.” But I just did my own translation and I’d like to call it…
Waldgespräch
Meeting in a forest
Es ist schon spät, es wird schon kalt,
Was reit’st Du einsam durch den Wald?
Der Wald ist lang, Du bist allein,
Du schöne Braut! Ich führ dich heim!
The hour is late, the air grows cold,
Why ride forsaken through the wood?
The wood is long, thou art alone,
O lovely maid, I’ll lead thee home!
“Groß ist der Männer Trug und List,
Vor Schmerz mein Herz gebrochen ist,
Wohl irrt das Waldhorn her und hin,
O flieh! Du weißt nicht, wer ich bin.”
“False and deceitful are all men,
My heart is rent with bitter pain,
The hunting horn has led thee astray,
O flee! Thou knowest not my name.”
So reich geschmückt ist Roß und Weib,
So wunderschön der junge Leib,
Jetzt kenn ich Dich – Gott steh’ mir bei!
Du bist die Hexe Loreley.
So richly adorned are lady and steed,
So beautiful and young indeed,
I know thee now – God be my guide!
The witch thou art, the Loreley.
“Du kennst mich wohl – von hohem Stein,
Schaut still mein Schloß tief in den Rhein.
Es ist schon spät, es wird schon kalt,
Kommst nimmermehr aus diesem Wald!”
“Thou know’st me well – my silent keep
Looks down into the Rhine so deep.
The hour is late, the air grows cold,
Shalt never leave this evil wood!”
I could spend paragraphs justifying my choices here, but wouldn’t that be dull? Instead, put your quibbles in the comment box. I know there are some. Every literary translation walks around with a horde of quibbles carrying its train.
On the plus side, this English version should fit the music quite well. The first line of stanza 3 is a little awkward but you can make it work.
In conclusion, here’s an unusual and very pleasant recording of Schumann Lieder where a cello takes the singer’s part. This song starts at 24:29.
Deutsch für Amerikaner, my mom’s old German textbook (copyright 1960) is an interesting social-history artifact. Here’s a passage where a university student from Germany discusses the American family he’s staying with. (All these people are fictional of course, but intended to be representative of their time and place.)
WHO IS HEAD OF THE HOUSEHOLD?
The day before yesterday Prof. Welliver, who is an enthusiastic hunter, took a day off to go pheasant hunting. A neighbor who also hunts came at 6:30 in the morning to pick him up. At six he was in the kitchen frying himself a couple of eggs for breakfast. I was also up early doing a term paper and he invited me to have breakfast with him. I was surprised that neither Mrs. Welliver nor one of his daughters had gotten up to help him.
He must have read my thoughts because he said: “Yes, my wife and daughters don’t think much of hunting and they think my enthusiasm for hunting is a bit queer.
So I can’t expect that they’ll get up at 5:30 in the morning. Where you’re from in Germany a professor can afford to hire a maid. But I can’t do that. Our American girls and women would rather work in factories and offices than in other people’s houses. That’s understandable. And then, of course, maids can charge so much money that a university professor can’t afford to keep one.”
Then I asked him: “May I ask a personal question?”
“Shoot!” he laughed.
“I can imagine your wife is tired,” I said, “but why did neither of your two daughters get up to make you breakfast?”
Prof. Welliver laughed: “They are also too tired. The life of an American girl in high school is more strenuous than you think.”
I looked at him with astonishment, because I knew that high school students here did not work nearly as hard as we do. He said his daughters were very popular and that meant they had to be at everything. Then Prof. Welliver saw that I had nothing left on my plate. “More toast, Karl, another egg?” Before I could answer, he had already put the bread in the toaster and cracked an egg into the pan. How friendly and affectionate it sounds when this professor with gray hair who specializes in the Reformation calls me Karl! And what a charming host he is! On such occasions I always feel something of the warm-heartedness and true humanity that could only have developed in democratic America.
And who is Prof. Welliver’s hunting partner? A dean? A colleague? An academic? Not at all! The neighbor is the manager of a grocery store in the center of our little university town. But the two men called each other by their first names, as I noticed when the professor got into the gleaming car.
Kolonialwarengeschäft!
I had offered to wash the dishes. How quickly one gets used to the American way of life! In Germany I would not have dared to offer a professor my help in his house, because it would have embarrassed him even if he didn’t have a maid. The thing about the maid is not so tragic, by the way. Mrs. Welliver does not have a maid but she has a refrigerator, a freezer, a vacuum cleaner, a washing machine with automatic dryer, an electric dishwasher, in other words everything that American technology has to offer the housewife.
However, it’s not the case that she has more freedom than a German housewife. She has many social duties. School, church, clubs and the social lives of her two daughters fill her days and some of her evenings.
I didn’t really like the fact that neither of the two girls had gotten up to help their father. And that they made fun of his hunting seemed to me disrespectful, considering their young age. This lack of paternal authority, or male authority in general, bothers me as a German especially. I know the absolute authority of the man, as was considered a given in Germany – especially Germany before the First World War – is not ideal. I myself know German families where the daughter cleans the father’s and brothers’ shoes on Sunday mornings while the “men” are still peacefully sleeping.
As a cultural critic, when I see something like that, I shake my head sadly. I do the same when I see Prof. Welliver’s daughters with their “boy friends” here in the house.
These visits by the “boy friends” are arranged through long telephone conversations. When the girls speak to their young men, neither the professor nor Mrs. Welliver nor I can get on the phone, because these conversations go on for hours. They giggle, and the most trivial things are discussed earnestly, to the point where you could think these girls were not entirely normal. But that’s not true. That’s just how they talk with their young friends. When I talk to them, all at once they become different people, very mature, very intelligent and full of interest in anything that is worth knowing.
If the “dates” come into the house, they have no consideration for anybody. The young people laugh and scream and dance to loud music from the record player. The fact that their father is sitting in his office upstairs working on one of his publications obviously does not bother them at all and their father doesn’t say anything. I always expect the door to his office to fly open and for him to demand quiet with a thundering voice. But that is a German expectation. The office door opens, but the professor just goes down to greet his young guests and tell them “Have a good time!”
But there’s one more thing I should mention. The girls’ long telephone conversations prevent me from using the phone, but they’re useful to me nonetheless. I have to listen, because the phone is at the foot of the stairs near my room. This way I can expand my American vocabulary and my list of untranslatable words. But I still don’t know why a certain Bill is “a card,” a certain Joe is “a square,” a certain Bob is “a doll,” and a certain Hank is “a creep”.
Clara Schumann: the Artist and the Woman by Nancy B. Reich
If you’ve ever read The Gulag Archipelago, you probably remember the story where nobody wanted to be the first to stop clapping for Comrade Stalin:
The applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! […] They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! […] Nine minutes! Ten!…Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers.
The one who finally had the nerve to sit down first after 11 minutes was sent to the Gulag, of course. But what interests me about this passage right now is that 11 minutes seemed like an insane amount of applause to all involved.
Think about that, and then consider: at a concert she gave on February 27, 1837 in Berlin, Clara Wieck got an hour and half of thunderous applause.
An hour and a half! That’s the time it takes to watch a full-length film, and Clara Wieck made people want to spend it banging their hands together. That’s how good she was.
In Clara Schumann, The Artist and the Woman, Nancy B. Reich explains how she became one of the greatest pianists of the 19th century. Her father, the piano teacher Friedrich Wieck, zeroed in on her as the most talented of his children and dedicated his life to making her a great musician and a star.
Here are the things Clara Wieck was allowed to do as a child:
Play the piano
Take long walks
Eat
Sleep
I guess we can also include “write in her diary,” although often it was her father who did so – in her voice. “Father arrived by express coach at seven in the evening,” he wrote in one entry, “I flew into his arms and took him right to the Hotel Stadt Frankfurt.” Wieck was so possessive about his daughter’s childhood diaries that she was forty years old by the time he agreed to relinquish them to her.
Wieck was not only possessive and controlling but also fierce – Robert Schumann once visited his home to find him dragging one of Clara’s younger brothers around by the hair as a punishment for substandard violin playing. “Am I among humans?” wondered Robert in his own diary.
At home with the Wiecks
So, given a range of options, most of us wouldn’t choose Friedrich Wieck as a dad. To be fair, though, by applying his merciless training to her natural aptitude, he did succeed in making Clara a musician of the highest order. Hence the hour and a half of applause.
Unsurprisingly, Wieck was loath to allow any other man to take his Clara away and hated Robert Schumann with a passion (he also ended up hating the guy he invited over to distract her from Robert Schumann). Clara and Robert had to sue him for permission to marry; Wieck submitted a statement to the court to the effect that Robert “could not help Clara with her career since he was socially inept […]; that he crippled his finger through his own stupidity; that he lied about his income; that he had been badly brought up and displayed an indescribable egotism and unlimited vanity; that he was a solitary drinker and drank to excess, and that he did not really love Clara – he wanted to use her for his own purposes and live off the money she earned as an artist.”
Also interesting is his assertion that Clara, “having been trained as an artist, was unfit to run a home.” This reminds me of Piero Melograni’s biography of Mozart, where he argues that the popular conception of Mozart as practically incapable of functioning in society (cf. Amadeus) comes from his family’s attempt to convince themselves and anyone who would listen that he couldn’t get along without them. Perhaps it’s always that way with child prodigies.
This book gives a thorough account of Clara as a musician, teacher, and composer. It also includes juicy gossip, like what a dead weight of a husband Robert eventually became with his mercurial (literally?) moods and inability to handle….anything, really, before he finally broke with reality altogether (Wieck wasn’t entirely wrong about him); or everything you ever wanted to know about Clara and Brahms. Peter Schickele’s Interear Telecommuniculture Phone ™ sketch, where the dial-up request for a Schumann symphony includes the option, “If you would like to hear this piece as the composer would have written it if he had known that Brahms had the hots for his wife, press 3,” left teenage me with the impression that this was a long-simmering love triangle. But Brahms only met Robert and Clara about 6 months before Robert attempted suicide and went to live in a padded room.
Brahms was there with Clara when Robert died two years later. They had a deep and fruitful relationship and he probably was in love with her, although he was probably also in love with her daughter Julie. Life is complicated.
Anyway, this book is well researched and well written, and it’s still in print, so there’s no excuse for you not to read it. You can also listen to this:
The world recently lost an inspiring teacher and all-round excellent person: Prof. Raymond Furness of the University of St. Andrews.
He was the first German tutor I met at St. Andrews, at a reception for overseas students. I saw “German” on his name tag and said, “Oh!” but when he turned my way I came over all skittish and bolted across the room. Luckily our paths crossed again and he asked me in his usual booming voice what I was studying — he was of course very happy to hear (faintly) that it was German. He asked me about myself and I mentioned my Shetland sheepdog; in every significant conversation we had over the next 6 years, he would ask, “How is your little dog, Tuppence?”
He was our tutor for first-year literature and I’ll never forget the day when, about 10 minutes into class, he realized none of us had actually read the assigned book. He paused and looked at each of us in turn. “Yes, you’re naughty children, aren’t you?” he said, “Well, no need to waste my time with you, I’m going to the pub.” And he put his coat on and walked over to The Central, leaving us to exchange sheepish glances.
If you passed a room where he was teaching, you knew it because some over-the-top comment like “I MEAN LADIES! WOULD YOU REALLY WANT TO SHARE YOUR HUSBAND WITH A DEAD MAN??!?” would be distinctly audible through the door.
His German Expressionism class was a highlight for most honours students, who really got what they came for on the days when he read aloud from Georg Kaiser’s Gas or Arnolt Bronnen’s Vatermord.
In my third year, at a dinner for students in another tutor’s Nietzsche module, someone called him a misogynist so I popped by during his office hours soon afterwards to say, “Hi, Professor Furness, are you a misogynist?” He said he loved women and to prove it, he invited me in for several glasses of sherry and picked my brain for gossip, which was exactly what I had been hoping for.
Ray Furness was in tune with everything that was chthonic, decadent, fatalistic, grandiose, disjointed, or existentially troubling in German arts and letters. You could rely on him to know everything about every famous German or Austrian who had ever gone mad or shot himself in the head. But he was a very nice person. If there’s a heaven, I’m sure he is there playing ping-pong with Max Schreck…or something like that.
Yours truly with the professor at his retirement party (Siegfried’s funeral march was playing in the background)
More avant-garde poetry brought to you by a machine translation system that is still learning the ropes:
I put my son on my son,
no. 6,
and he scratched herself,
thought it was all about this pants,
I thought that it comes from these pants.
I am still sending a picture of these pants,
I am still sending pictures of these pants,
I am still sending pictures of these pants,
I still send photos of them.
Maybe the pants came from the pants.
(This output is dramatically different from the source, which was longer and didn’t mention pants or pictures nearly this much. Poor grammar/punctuation in source probably threw the machine into a panic.)
In 2007, I was a frumpy housewife in small-town Ontario with two children running in all directions and two German degrees gathering dust in the attic. My career up to that point had consisted of a couple of poems one of my professors had seen fit to publish, an annual review of the German legal market which was lengthy but posed few stylistic challenges, and a decision to move to the margins of civilization to focus on having babies, canning beets, and feeding a woodstove.
“I know you’re dreadfully busy,” wrote an old friend on Facebook, which I used to check in between changing diapers, sealing mason jars, and flinging logs onto the fire, for in those days Facebook was still fun and I was still there, “But I have this family friend who is a translator and has too much work, do you think you could possibly help her out?”
The translator was Aileen Derieg and I was delighted to heed this particular call to adventure. She sent me the first job: an earnest meditation on building bridges, literally and figuratively, and what St. John Nepomuk could teach the EU. “Aileen Derieg has drunk champagne with you!” Facebook cheerfully notified me after I sent her my translation. That was about the best feedback I could have hoped for, so our collaboration continued.
And it turned out Aileen Derieg was about the best person one could ever hope to collaborate with. Not only had she established an enviable network of clients through years of highly competent work, but she was also thoughtful, patient, rational, open-minded, gracious, helpful, and – crucially in my case – understanding about the ups and downs of childcare and their impact on deadlines.
For years, she had been converting the densest, most intricate German prose into clear and readable English. Behind her back, those of us to whom she was subcontracting would sometimes trade frustrated messages. As one of her other assistants wrote to me in 2008: “I am despairing! My text is incomprehensible! Impossible! AAAARGHARGHARGHRGHAGHGAHRGHAGRHGAAAAGH. I have given up trying to understand the text, I am just painstakingly translating every sentence word by word…” But Aileen inhabited a lofty realm where such texts were the norm, and she translated them with aplomb.
One thing that became obvious when any of us asked Aileen for help disentangling webs of critical theory was that she had the utmost respect for all her clients and never adopted a mocking or dismissive attitude towards their work. Perhaps she was merely an early adopter of the maxim, “Dance like nobody’s watching, email like it’s going to be read out in a deposition someday,” but I believe she truly was filled with saintly goodwill. No matter how complex the style of a text or how surprising its content – she handled it with a sincere desire to understand it and communicate its message in English. This attitude, along with all the specific useful feedback she gave me over the years, taught me what I needed to know to go forward.
Aileen is retired now, and I will think of her with gratitude every day. Her very talented son, Christopher Hütmannsberger, and I will be available to serve her client base. And now that she’s not drowning in book projects, I might pepper her inbox with thorny translation questions every day. Watch out, Aileen!
Aileen distributes kiwi cocktails to her successors at the retirement party
Translating Wolfram’s Parzival has got to be a total nightmare, though it’s probably also fun.
His style is, by his own admission, comparable to a startled hare darting this way and that. This applies to individual sentences but also to the entire narrative. Some questions you may ask yourself when reading Parzival include: Did we already meet Plihopliheri in a previous chapter or was that Plippalinot? Is everyone in this book related? How much cousin marriage is going on here? Where did those guys come from and why are they attacking that castle? Why are we talking about the neutral angels again? How many times will I have to read this sentence before I understand it? And many more.
There are three published prose translations of Parzival: a joint effort from 1961 by Helen Mustard and Charles Passage (who aren’t characters from Toast of London but probably should be), a 1980 Penguin Classics edition by A.T. Hatto, and a fairly recent effort by Cyril Edwards for Oxford World’s Classics (2004). No one in our time has been insane enough publish a rhyming-couplets version. [Update: in fact, there is a new verse translation. See here.] Jessie Weston did it in 1894, but translation standards were looser then.
I have a soft spot for Cyril Edwards’ translation because when he was working on it, he came to St. Andrews to speak to the German medievalists. He gave us a very informative presentation about his own choices and how they compared to previous editions. I particularly remember how proud he was to have found the most accurate possible translation for “ramschoup” in Book IX. Apparently after laborious research he determined it was “purple moorgrass.” Our professors thought this would sound oddly specific in context – other translators were content to call it “straw” and it’s hard to imagine one character telling another, “I don’t have furniture but you can sit on that pile of purple moorgrass over there…” – but he couldn’t bear for his research to have been in vain and insisted on keeping purple moorgrass because that’s what ramschoup is! And indeed, there it is on p. 204 of the book: “Then they went back to lie on their purple moorgrass, by their coals.”
Purple moorgrass.
Having recently skimmed all three translations, I suspect Mustard & Passage is the most readable. However, research into medieval literature and culture is always uncovering new things and solving little mysteries, so the fact that it came out in 1961 probably means it has more errors than the other two. These are unlikely to matter if you’re reading it for fun but if you’re a grad student, watch out.
Hatto’s has the most prosaic feel – he tends to collapse sentences or shift their parts around to avoid some of Wolfram’s twists and turns.
Both Hatto and Mustard/Passage tried to calm the startled hare of Wolfram’s style to make the reading experience less confusing. Edwards, on the other hand, says in his introduction that “this translation, in the interest of trying to convey something of Wolfram’s stylistic originality, will give the reader a rougher ride than its predecessors.”
Here are some excerpts to give you a sense of the different translations. First, from the prologue:
Mustard and Passage: I mean to tell you once again a story that speaks of great faithfulness, of the ways of womanly women and of a man’s manhood so forthright that never against hardness was it broken. Never did his heart betray him, he all steel, when he came to combat, for there his victorious hand took many a prize of praise. A brave man slowly wise – thus I hail my hero – sweetness to women’s eyes and yet to women’s hearts a sorrow, from wrongdoing a man in flight! The one whom I have thus chosen is, story-wise, as yet unborn, he of whom this adventure tells and to whom many marvels there befall.
Hatto: I will renew a tale that tells of great fidelity, of inborn womanhood and manly virtue so straight as never was bent in any test of hardness. Steel that he was, his courage never failed him, his conquering hand seized many a glorious prize when he came to battle. Dauntless man, though laggard in discretion! – Thus I salute the hero. – Sweet balm to woman’s eyes, yet woman’s heart’s disease! Shunner of all wrongdoing! As yet he is unborn to this story whom I have chosen for the part, the man of whom this tale is told and all the marvels in it.
Edwards: A story I will now renew for you, which tells of great loyalty, womanly woman’s ways, and man’s manliness so steadfast that it never bent before hardship. His heart never betrayed him there – steel he was, whenever he entered battle. His hand seized victoriously full many a praiseworthy prize. Bold was he, laggardly wise – it is the hero I so greet, woman’s eyes’ sweetness alongside woman’s heart’s desire, a true refuge from misdeed. He whom I have chosen for this purpose is, storywise, yet unborn – he of whom this adventure tells, in which many marvels will befall him.
There’s plenty to comment on here but I’ll just point out one thing: both M/P and Edwards have “storywise” where Hatto has opted for the more ordinary “to this story.” Wolfram’s word is “maereshalp” which is almost certainly his own neologism. “Storywise” is a solid translation and makes your ears perk up in the same way as the original.
Here’s what it sounds like when Lady Adventure knocks on the narrator’s heart:
Mustard and Passage:
“Open up!” – To whom? Who are you? – “I want to come into your heart to you.” – Then it is a small space you wish. – “What does that matter? Though I scarcely find room, you will have no need to complain of crowding. I will tell you now of wondrous things.” – Oh, is it you, Lady Adventure?
Hatto:
“Open!” – “To whom? Who is there?” – “I wish to enter your heart.” – “Then you want too narrow a space.” – “How is that? Can’t I just squeeze in? I promise not to jostle you. I want to tell you marvels.” – “Can it be you, Lady Adventure?”
Edwards:
“Open up!” – To whom? Who are you? – “I want to go into your heart.” – That’s a narrow space you want to enter! – “What of it, even if I barely survive! You’ll seldom have cause to complain of my jostling! I want to tell you of wonders now!” – Oh, it’s you, is it, Lady Adventure?
Big differences here in how Lady Adventure’s long response is translated. Edwards’ version might be closest to the original (“waz denne, belibe ich kume?* min dringen soltu selten clagen: ich wil dir nu von wunder sagen“) but Hatto’s sounds the most like something you might actually want to read aloud.
Which reminds me – the ideal way to experience this story is to sit with some friends and hear it recited. After all, according to Wolfram, it isn’t even a book and reading is for losers.
Forget reading – ladies like a man who rides around with axes on his head
But however you experience it, a long engagement with this story will feel like an exhaustive tour of a Gothic cathedral that leaves you spent but filled with admiration.
Photo credits: baby hares by Jang Woo Lee, purple moorgrass by Elke Freese, Wolfram von Eschenbach in the Codex Manesse at: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg848/0294
You can access a verse translation by A. S. Kline for free here!
*(And btw I’ll admit to not being sure what “belibe ich kume” means – anyone want to enlighten me there?)
The phrase “the Romanische Café” caught my eye in an English-language book about Berlin and I got so stuck on this phrase that I couldn’t concentrate on the rest of the paragraph.
Why? Because I would have written “the Romanisches Café” for logical reasons, but the version above also makes a kind of sense and I couldn’t stop turning it over in my head.
In case you don’t speak German: the problem is that German adjectives have different endings depending on gender and case, so with no article it’s “Romanisches Café.” With the definite article it’s “das Romanische Café.” Meanwhile, people who are in the café are “im Romanischen Café.”
My personal feeling about adjectives that are part of names is that in English they should take their strong nominative ending, the one that tells you the gender of the noun – in this case, “The Romanisches Café” with a neuter “s.” Why? Because in German, the reason you can leave the “s” off the adjective when using the definite article (das) is that the article provides the “s,” which is essentially the (nominative) marker of neuter gender. The English article “the” never provides that kind of information about German words, obviously, so when you preface a German phrase with “the,” it feels like you aren’t using an article, or you’re using one that’s not doing its job. Therefore your default form should be whatever form the name would take in German with no article. The Neues Rathaus, the Englischer Garten, the Alte Pinakothek.
But apparently there’s disagreement on this point. A Google search for “the Englischer Garten” turned up 2900 results while “the Englische Garten” yielded 1840 (despite quotation marks the results were somewhat imprecise and I wouldn’t be surprised if the split is closer to 50/50). Books that are searchable in Google Books similarly disagree on whether it’s “the Romanisches Café” or “the Romanische Café.”
I assume the reasoning behind the latter is that you’re using a definite article, and in German you wouldn’t pair a strong adjective ending with a definite article, so why would you do it in English? Although doesn’t that put you on a slippery slope to writing things like “Bertolt Brecht spent much of his time in the Romanischen Café?”
Are you a translator who’s thought about this issue? I’d love to read your comments!
Update 6/6/2019: Here’s another good example: The Vienna Technical Museum mostly uses its German name, Technisches Museum Wien, on the English pages of its website. Note the adjective ending on their name in this English sentence: “With five interactive stations, the Technische Museum Wien goes on tour.” [I shortened that, btw. Here’s the page.]
Machine translation can do impressive things, as I’ve noted before. However, there are some things humans do easily that would be very difficult (perhaps impossible) to build into MT programs.
I’m part of an ongoing machine translation post editing job for a client who needs to translate large amounts of customer feedback coming in every day. In theory, MTPE is perfect for this because it can handle a high volume of text cheaply and the client does not need the translations to be beautifully written – they just need to get a basic understanding of the customer feedback.
However, because this is feedback from the general public, it has a lot of little problems that turn out to be big problems for the MT:
Spelling errors
The general public is really lazy about capitalization, which is a pity because capitalization is the only thing that lets MT know if a German-speaking writer means “they” (sie) or “you [formal]” (Sie). At least 50% of the people who type this feedback write “sie” when they should be writing “Sie,” and the MT has no choice but to translate it as “they,” because it’s ultimately just a pattern-matching machine. But as a human, it’s usually easy for me to tell from the context which one the writer means.
Typos are another source of misunderstanding. In one of my jobs a respondent had typed just two letters in reverse order, turning “Zahnbürste” (toothbrush) into “Zahnbrüste” which the MT interpreted as “dental breasts.” Not a bad guess for a machine, but humans can see right away what kind of error this is and what the correct translation should be.
Major typos just show up on the target side unchanged because the MT can’t interpret them at all. 90% of the time I can figure them out quickly.
Autocorrect
There’s no way for the MT to figure out when someone writes a company to complain about substandard “girls” that they actually meant “forks.” Humans are good at context clues.
Poorly expressed ideas
If you’re not using punctuation, you don’t speak the language you’re typing in very well, or you’re just too angry to construct a coherent sentence, the MT is going to translate your comment as a crazy word salad, e.g.:
“9 months prior has I will go to the Media and the way in which you handled this üb he England, I can also not the process started I do I go to bild newspaper in the order to the internet to my attorney I have never before a customer hang 1 ¾ year, I repeat it’s totally shameless I have sent back the questionnaire now and receive a reminder, the [sic], they know even if the eingeganen not an is; it’s a bottomLess outrageous only pass is its motto it’s not my problem it’s really shameless two weeks, I give you still danns 14 days, I give you still then”
Comments from people who struggle with German show up now and again in this job. One of them began “Where whore does it say you can’t use this product on tattooed skin?” At first I thought the commenter was insulting the customer service rep (“Where, whore, does it say…”) but I concluded it was probably something like, “Where the hell does it say…” based on a series of judgements MT doesn’t have the mental flexibility or experience for.
So never fear, human translators, even if MT takes over most of the translation business, there will always be work for you.
[This post was updated on 9/4/2018 to include some good examples that crossed my path.]
