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.]
Well, as your mother who should always be proud I was a little confounded and bemused!
I haven’t thought about this a lot, but my first instinct is to use the weak ending. However, that may well be because most of the translating I do is of Germanic languages that left this mortal coil a thousand years ago; these days, the “always use a weak adjective with a definite article” rule is pretty much limited to German and Icelandic, so it’s likely that I’m in the minority on that. Conversely, my second instinct is not to use any kind of inflection at all – The Romanisch Café – which sounds awkward, but not any less awkward than any other translation I can come up with. I suppose “The Romanèsque Café” would be taking it a bit too far…
Well, just yesterday I had to translate something about an artist in Berlin who hung out “im Romanischen Café”!
“Almost every day he met his friends at the Romanisches Café,” I wrote.
There you go.
I agree, it should only be “Romanisches” – no point trying to decline adjectives in a language like English, where adjectives don’t decline. I wouldn’t do that in Slavic languages either. Nobody says “I’m reading Dostoyevskogo!”