Here’s an interesting article about how to translate “Pork Pie Plot” into other languages, especially in the context of headlines. The PPP is an attempt to unseat Prime Minister Boris Johnson (who, incidentally, is descended from one of the best-known and most controversial German-to-English translators, Helen Lowe-Porter).
a pork pie
With regard to headlines, two questions come up here: 1. Should you use these kinds of quirky foreign phrases in headlines? And 2. If you do, should you translate them or leave them in the original language?
My answer to (1) would usually be yes, because it’s an attention grabber. The answer to (2) largely depends on what the two languages are and whether the speakers of the target language tend to be familiar with the source language. You might include Spanish in a US newspaper headline but you wouldn’t do the same with Mongolian. It also depends on whether the target language has a clear equivalent. I googled “torta di maiale” and found that Italy seems to have pork pies that look a lot like the British ones, so sure, go ahead and translate “the Pork Pie Plot” as “il complotto della torta di maiale.” Google Translate is a little confused about this food item, though:
Yesterday, November 11, 2020, was the twentieth anniversary of the Kaprun disaster, where 155 people died in a train fire in a mountain tunnel. Journalists Hannes Uhl and Hubertus Godeysen investigated the accident and its aftermath and wrote a book – 155: Kriminalfall Kaprun – in 2014. They asked me to translate it into English and that translation is now available as an e-book. It came out a few days ago, just in time for the anniversary. I hope it will be of some benefit to people who lost relatives in the accident.
Not many people in the English-speaking world have heard of the Kaprun disaster but there were British and American tourists among the casualties. An entire American family was wiped out. There is a National Geographic documentary about it, although please note that it contains some inaccuracies about the cause of the fire that are corrected by the book.
Notes on the translation:
The original book is written in the historic present, which is much more common in German than in English. Usually, I change it to the past tense for English translations, but in this case the present seemed appropriate for the style and subject matter.
I translated it into British English the first time around and was then asked to Americanize it, so if you come across any stray British terms, that’s why.
I am aware of one error: in chapter 37, I translated the German word Feder as “spring,” when it should have been “tongue.” I realized my mistake after translating the book’s website, but by then it was too late. I am sorry! It’s only one word out of 51,724, but unfortunately it was a rather important one.
If you are an expert on funicular railways or the Austrian legal system and you find other important errors, please write to me through my contact form on this website and let me know so it can be corrected in a future edition.
I hope people find the book readable and informative. It certainly was a privilege for me to work on it.
Since I wrote about English pet peeves last week, I thought it would be a good idea to highlight some German ones this week and try to explain them to readers who don’t speak German. Why? Because this blog is supposed to be about English and German, and because I deserve to suffer for my manifold sins and wickedness.
Grammar:
Let’s look at wegen + the dative case. This is such a classic pet peeve that I had no trouble finding two video clips to illustrate it.
German has four cases: nominative (the subject, e.g. “he lives here”), accusative (basically the direct object, e.g. “I saw him“), dative (basically the indirect object, e.g. “I gave him a piece of my mind”), and genitive (basically possessive, e.g. “and he gave me a piece of his“) but unlike English, which has gotten lazy, it applies them all over the place – not just to pronouns but to tables, meatballs, birds, planets, whatever.
Traditionally, “wegen” (“because of”) is allied with the genitive case. Look at the English phrase “because of a meatball” and you can kind of see the possessive element. It’s a meatball’s because, so to speak. But some decades ago, “wegen” started losing the genitive in casual speech and taking the dative instead, so that insisting on the genitive now marks you out as an insufferable pedant.
This clip from Pastewka illustrates the point perfectly. Pastewka is basically the German equivalent of Curb your Enthusiasm. Below we have the main character, who just can’t stop making everyone hate him, arguing with a cafeteria lady about whether she only gave him 14 meatballs instead the regulation 15. German has many words for meatball, but in the clip below they are Swedish meatballs, or “köttbullar” — and please note that although in Swedish a singular meatball is a “köttbulle,” the German speakers here are using the plural “köttbullar” as if it were singular (why am I doing this again? oh yeah, my sins) — so when the lady rebukes him at about 1:00 for causing so much trouble because of a meatball (“wegen einem Köttbullar” – dative), he makes sure to say “wegen eines Köttbullars” (genitive) in his reply, which tells us a lot about the kind of person he is.
Incidentally, if you had to put English subtitles on this, that exchange would be a challenge to translate. Suggestions welcome.
Similarly, in this next clip about the fictional childhood adventures of Jan Böhmermann, we see him correcting the school principal at about 0:30 over another dative/genitive issue (“vom Unterricht verwiesen” vs. “des Unterrichts verwiesen”), which causes her to pause mid-sentence at about 0:50 when she’s asking the secretary to send in another student “because of the bullying incident” and change her initial dative “wegen dem” to a genitive “wegen des,” to young Jan’s evident satisfaction.
Denglisch
The use and abuse of English loan words and the importation of English grammatical tendencies into German is known as Denglisch (cf. franglais). People are always claiming to hate it — Marcel Reich-Ranicki called it “lächerlich und abscheulich” (“ludicrous and despicable”) and he’d seen enough atrocities in his life to have a sense of what was worth complaining about — but some people must love it because it’s everywhere.
Sometimes Denglisch is just plain old English loan words like “download”, or “cool,” or “management” (pr. “menechment”) with meanings that are familiar to us.
Sometimes it’s words that exist in English but have taken on new meaning in German, like “Handy” (for cellphone/mobile) or “Bodybag” (for messenger bag/sling bag). Yikes.
Sometimes it’s whole sentences. Why are these words displayed on a store front in Vienna? And what — dare I ask? — is a meat baby?
Commas are a problem, but thanks for using “it’s” correctly, guys
A grammatical example that springs to mind is the use of “in” with years. In German, things don’t “happen in 1905” — they “happen 1905” or “in the year 1905” but not “in 1905” (“my grandmother moved 1905 to Berlin,” you might say). There’s a creeping tendency to use “in” with years as it’s done in English, which people sometimes remark on.
Die Prinzen, a pop band whose work was once ubiquitous in American high-school German classes, have a funny song about Denglisch. It starts out:
Ich wollte mit der Bahn Ganz spontan in Urlaub fahr’n Und der Typ sagt: “Stell’n Sie sich mit der BahnCard am Ticket counter an Woll’n Sie InterCity, RailMail oder Metropolitan?” “Oh ja, gern. Aber was ist das denn?” “Damit fahr’n Sie stress-free zu Ihrem Meeting im First-class-business-Zug Danach chillen Sie in der Lounge.” “Oh, das klingt ja gut. Und gibt’s an Board denn auch einen Wurstwagen, mein Freund?” “Nee, aber ‘n Servicepoint. Da kriegen Sie ‘n Snackpack for Wellness!”
I wanted to take a spur-of-the-moment train trip and the guy says: “Go to the ticket counter with your BahnCard. Do you want InterCity, RailMail, or Metropolitan?” “Oh, sure. What is that, though?” “It’ll take you stress-free to your meeting in the first-class business train. Then you can chill in the lounge. “Oh, that sounds good. And is there a Wurstwagen (‘sausage car’) on board too, my friend?” “No, there’s a servicepoint. You can get a Snackpack for Wellness!”
Folksy posturing
A correspondent in Switzerland says she dislikes it when certain politicians and media figures import sentence structures from the Swiss-German dialect into high German, with results that sound “more awkward than down-to-earth.” She mentions:
Das ist der Claudia ihre Wohnung (lit. “That’s to the Claudia her apartment”) instead of “das ist Claudias Wohnung” (“That’s Claudia’s apartment”).
Hier ist dem Jürg sein Artikel (same construction as above – “Here’s to the Jürg his article” Here’s an interesting blog post about that construction in Swiss German.)
Der Musiker, wo ich gestern gesehen habe. (“The musician where I saw yesterday”) instead of Der Musiker, den ich gestern gesehen habe (“The musician whom I saw yesterday”).
So that’s a taste of the things that annoy German speakers. And if it seems weird to you that anyone gets mad about whether it’s “wegen dem Regen” or “wegen des Regens,” now you know how significant your English pet peeves really are.
Lexicon Valley is a great podcast by the linguist John McWhorter, who manages to be fun while also being right about everything.
The latest episode is about linguistic pet peeves, something linguists aren’t really supposed to have – it’s unseemly, like communists having brand preferences. But even people who know most linguistic pet peeves are irrational can’t help having some. I certainly do, and while fully acknowledging their irrationality and pointlessness, I still want to kick people in the head when they say “I’ve never stepped foot in Russia” or “We need to examine our own biaseez.” Arrgh, shut up, morons!
Anyway…here are my takes on the pet peeves mentioned in the podcast:
“You just can’t…” As in, “You just can’t lie around the house all day” instead of “You can’t just lie around the house all day.” I think he’s actually too hard on himself for disliking this one, because it’s still the case that many people perceive a difference in meaning between “just can’t” and “can’t just”: “Lying around used to be Bob’s favorite pastime, but now that all his furniture’s been repo’d he just can’t lie around the house!” (poor him) vs. “When are you going to get a job? You can’t just lie around the house,” (you lazy bum). So they’re not interchangeable and it’s fair to be annoyed when the words get out of order.
“Aren’t I?” – Putting a construction promoted by grammar mavens on a list of your pet peeves is a real power move. This particular one also makes me very happy, because I dislike it as well. It seemed vaguely wrong to me when I was child, and there were a couple of times when I said something like “Ain’t I good at swimming?” and got a smackdown from teachers or even other children who were of the “aren’t” party, so I gave up finding an alternative. I still think “ain’t” makes a whole lot more sense, though. Pro tip: avoid the whole problem by asking, “am I not?”
“Shrimps” (or deers, or sheeps). This would have annoyed me in my early youth but I got over it, as our podcast host apparently also did.
Re “Billy and me are going to the store” (not a pet peeve but something he mentions in passing), I disagree with McWhorter about whether that actually makes sense. IMHO if you want “me” in there instead of “I,” it’s got to be “Billy and me, we’re going to the store.” (Cf. the entire French language.) “Billy and me are going…” feels wrong to me in an instinctive way, not a schoolhouse way. (And yes, I know I said before that he’s always right. He’s probably right about this, too…but I still disagree.)
The bigger problem with those “[someone] and I” constructions is that because teachers insist on making everyone put “I” second, it causes people to say stupid things like “Why are you being mean to Candace and I?” So I fully support the right of pronouns to migrate closer to verbs so speakers can remember what case they’re supposed to be in.
“There’s books on the table.” This used to bother me too, but I got over it by studying other languages where there’s no distinction between “there is” and “there are” and yet their speakers appear to be living normal lives. He mentions German (“es gibt”) and Finnish (?) but there’s also Spanish “hay” and French “il y a” and probably a ton of other examples. Shout-out to Italian, though, which still insists on this distinction (c’è una donna vs. ci sono molte donne).
“Can I get [a Coke]?” – Why would that bother anyone? You’re just asking permission to receive something, which he admits. McWhorter’s very good at critiquing his own pet peeves so I don’t have to. Instead, I’ll just say this one reminds me of people who hate “No problem” as a response to “Thank you.” Why? In so many languages, the standard response to “thank you” is essentially “for nothing” or “please [don’t thank me].” “No problem” is firmly rooted in that tradition; it says, “This wasn’t any extra effort, don’t worry about it, you don’t owe me anything, it’s cool.” Whereas “you’re welcome” has always seemed a little smug to me. I know that’s not the intention, but it seems to entail an acknowledgement that you (the person being thanked) actually did something to earn it, when in fact the general consensus (at least among Indo-Europeans) is that you’re supposed to pretend you didn’t. So I support “No problem.”
Everyone hates something about the way other people are using language. My mother hates any new phrase that gains sudden popularity; she used to hate “sea-change” and now she hates “that’s in your wheelhouse.” My sister once spent a good half hour of her life patiently explaining and re-explaining to a mall survey lady why her questions about a product being “very unique, somewhat unique, or not at all unique” didn’t make any sense because things are either unique or not and you can’t modify it (survey lady: “Oh, OK….So, would you say this product was very unique, somewhat unique…”). My kids’ pet peeves are mostly about pronunciation, e.g. expecially. Some people can’t stand to see “fun” used as an adjective, as it was in my first paragraph. How about you? Tell me in the comments.
Here’s a website I can recommend very highly: A.S. Kline’s collection of poetry in translation. I perused the German section and was favorably impressed. But many languages are represented – check it out if you’re looking for more reading material to keep you busy at home.
Kline is working on a new verse translation of Wolfram’s Parzival. What a gloriously insane undertaking. Let us hope the Plague does not cut him down ere he completes it.
Did you know the Internet was not actually created in order to
drive people insane and make them hate each other? It’s true.
Back in the nineties, most of us thought of the Internet as a
bigger, better version of your local library. It was a research tool with the
additional perk of email. Plus a few zany websites that you could either chuckle
at or ignore.
Nobody thought it would turn into The Machine That Ruined the
World. Well, I did, but I say that about every new thing so no one paid
attention to me.
Recently I found something that reminded me of why anyone ever thought the Internet was a good idea: the database of Yiddish Penny Songs.
In the olden days, say 1980, if you saw one of these songs mentioned in a book or heard about them from your Grandpa, and you were interested, you’d think, “Maybe I’ll hear one of those someday…” and then years would go by. You might bump into one in the sheet music section of a used book store. That’s nice, but do you understand Yiddish? If not, you won’t get much out of it. You could buy it and hope that someday you’ll meet someone who can sing and translate it for you. But the most likely outcome, unless you get out the phone book and start calling random synagogues to ask if anyone there is (1) able and (2) willing to come to your house to sing a song in Yiddish and translate it for you, is that it will sit around in a box, unsung and uncomprehended.
With the Internet, all it takes is one dedicated scholar to fix that whole problem for everyone. Please visit her website and look at her YouTube playlist where she sings the songs and provides excellent English subtitles, and say to yourself: truly, this is what the Internet is for.
I was pleased to see that my local pharmacy offers interpreting services not only to speakers of run-of-the-mill Deutsch but also to speakers of “Deitsch,” i.e. Pennsylvania Dutch:
What does German sound like to your average speaker of
English? Not great, apparently.
In Don DeLillo’s 1984 novel White Noise, which I’m currently reading on the recommendation of a
friend, the main character attends a German lesson and behold: “When [the
teacher] switched from English to German, it was as through a cord had been
twisted in his larynx. An abrupt emotion entered his voice, a scrape and gargle
that sounded like the stirring of some beast’s ambition. He gaped at me and
gestured, he croaked, he verged on strangulation. Sounds came spewing from the
base of his tongue, harsh noises damp with passion. He was only demonstrating
certain basic pronunciation patterns but the transformation in his face and
voice made me think he was making a passage between levels of being.”
Whoa, whooooa Don, calm down! It’s just another West Germanic language.
In Neither Here nor There, Bill Bryson describes German as “coarse and bestial” (offering “Lebensgröße” or “life-sized” as supporting evidence) and declares that German words for food sound like “the noises of a rutting pig.” Examples include “Portion Schlagobers,” which is a portion of whipped cream.
Is “whipped cream” really a term of such delicate beauty that it puts “Schlagobers” (or the more usual “Schlagsahne”) to shame? If your native language is English, you might think so. But that’s only because when you say “whipped cream,” you picture a delightful dessert. Say it a few times and try to forget what it means. “Whipped cream.” That’s a heck of a consonant cluster in the middle – ptcr – and we usually don’t consider those aesthetically pleasing. “Toilet brush” sounds prettier than “whipped cream.” Now consider that “Schlagobers” sounds lovely to German speakers for the same reason “whipped cream” does to English speakers: because of the light and fluffy concoction they envision when they say it.
One of the reasons I enjoyed deleting my F***b*** account was that my so-called friends kept pasting this video on my wall:
I could respond to this at length, but instead, here’s a perfect video response from “Easy Languages”:
It all depends on how you say it. Well, that and some other things. What determines whether we find another language beautiful or not?
Partly the sound patterns we’re accustomed to from our native language. English speakers seem to really dislike the voiceless velar fricative – the “ch” in “Bach.” Many languages have it but we generally regard it as a strike against them in the beauty department. It’s the reason why Bryson calls Dutch “a series of desperate hacking noises.” But to people who grow up with it, it’s just another sound in their language, which can give off friendly, elegant, tragic, cute, derisive or angry vibes according to the speaker’s mood.
In the case of German, we’re also influenced by the countless films where German soldiers goosestep into Poland barking orders at terrified civilians, or smack brave resistance fighters with their leather gloves before torturing them mercilessly. You know the drill. But if you need a reminder of that sound, here’s the late Bruno Ganz (RIP) yelling in Downfall.
Now let’s hear something totally different, sticking with Bruno Ganz for the sake of comparison.
Does this German sound as “scary” or “ugly” to you as the Downfall scene? If so, could that be based more on your feelings about history than the actual sounds coming out of his mouth? What if we could get some input here from an English speaker whose opinions were completely unaffected by WWII because it hadn’t happened yet? Here’s one that’s readily available: Mark Twain in The Awful German Language, 1880. He spends most of the essay arguing that German grammar and syntax are needlessly complex and convoluted, but here’s what he has to say about the sound of it:
“I think that a description of any loud, stirring, tumultuous episode must be tamer in German than in English. Our descriptive words of this character have such a deep, strong, resonant sound, while their German equivalents do seem so thin and mild and energyless. Boom, burst, crash, roar, storm, bellow, blow, thunder, explosion; howl, cry, shout, yell, groan; battle, hell. These are magnificent words; the have a force and magnitude of sound befitting the things which they describe. But their German equivalents would be ever so nice to sing the children to sleep with, or else my awe-inspiring ears were made for display and not for superior usefulness in analyzing sounds. Would any man want to die in a battle which was called by so tame a term as a Schlacht? Or would not a consumptive feel too much bundled up, who was about to go out, in a shirt-collar and a seal-ring, into a storm which the bird-song word Gewitter was employed to describe? And observe the strongest of the several German equivalents for explosion — Ausbruch. Our word Toothbrush is more powerful than that. It seems to me that the Germans could do worse than import it into their language to describe particularly tremendous explosions with. The German word for hell — Hölle — sounds more like helly than anything else; therefore, how necessarily chipper, frivolous, and unimpressive it is. If a man were told in German to go there, could he really rise to the dignity of feeling insulted?”
Well, well, well. So German’s not harsh enough.
These attempts to try to pin down a definite “feel” for the sound of a given word are pretty futile, by the way. If the sound of “hell” were as intrinsically dreadful as Twain implies, we wouldn’t name sweet little girls “Helen.”
I could go on for a few more pages, but I should probably stop here with some closing advice: try to appreciate each language on its own terms. They all sound different, and everyone thinks their own language sounds nice.
Also, here are a few of the words that (IMHO) sound nicer in German than in English:
Here’s a nice example of a common sentence structure in written German:
Obwohl er eine andere Vorlage geplant hatte, erschien ihm die in ihrer
Verdoppelung die Bildfläche vertikal teilende geometrische Form interessant
genug, um sie weiterzuverfolgen.
Literally: Although he an other template
planned had, seemed to him the in its doubling the picture surface vertically
dividing geometric shape interesting enough, to it further to follow.
Decent translation: Although he
had planned the template differently, the doubled geometric shape dividing the
picture vertically seemed interesting enough for him to continue working with
it.
(If you have any quibbles about that
final version, bear in mind this sentence was part of a paragraph and my
adjustments made sense in context.)
For Mark Twain, these kinds of sentences were among the targets of his ire;
see this example from “The Awful German Language”:
Wenn er aber auf der Strasse der in Sammt und Seide gehüllten jetzt sehr
ungenirt nach der neusten Mode gekleideten Regierungsräthin begegnet…
But when he, upon the street, the
(in-satin-and-silk-covered-now-very-unconstrained-after-the-newest-fashioned-dressed)
government counselor’s wife met…
By the way, “The Awful German Language” does contain some errors, one of which you might spot in the sentence above. I’ve never gotten around to writing about them, though, because I expect such a piece would be tedious to write and equally tedious to read.
Far from being awful, this sentence structure is actually useful in German
because it saves you from choppy sentences broken up by relative pronouns and
commas. So although I found it a little irritating at first, I’ve come to
appreciate it.
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.”
