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.
Do you mean the misspelling of “ungeniert”?
BTW I’ve noticed a tendency in machine translations of long German sentences, that the main verb often gets lost and simply disappears, like the computer lacks the memory to handle it. This really slows down the translation, because I have to spend time hunting down the verb, which would be easier to find if I were doing a straight translation.
I was thinking of the translation of “begegnet” as “met” rather than “meets.”
Yes, you’re right. I suppose “ungenirt” could be a correct spelling, depending on when it was written.
Re what you said about MT, things like that are frustrating because agencies assume any text that’s been through MT has been made “easier” for you, and they can therefore pay you less for it. But proofreading an already-kind-of-translated text that contains lots of random errors a human would never make is actually quite a difficult task. Some places have great MT and limit its application in such a way that it is a reliably easy job to proofread it, but any place that is working with a less-developed system or using it for very complex texts needs to hold off on reducing the pay rate.
Darn, that’s exactly what I wanted to say. Recently I’ve been thinking “this would be a lot easier as a straight translation” quite often. I sometimes have to re-translate entire cells from scratch because picking thru them takes too much time and is frustrating. And it does really drive down rates because it can be put into the “editing” category.