I sometimes find the German use of und and oder back to front.For example -

XXX ist nicht für die Unterbringung, Verpflegung und Transfers verantwortlich

My translation of this is

XXX is not responsible for accommodation, meals or transfers.

Which means that I am translating und as or. I do wonder what George Boole would have made of that? I suppose this goes with beziehungsweise, which is another one of those irritating words to translate with no direct equivalent in English.

Present translation memories store pairs of sentences. Kim’s translation memory would keep that, but would also keep pairs of documents with all of the pictures and formatting. PDF format would be good, see synchronising PDF documents too. This would mean keeping far more context than is currently the case, for almost zero effort. All you need is a bit of online storage and a fast connection.

I was astonished to find that Merker is an attempt by someone at Siemens to find a German word for “flag” in an IT context, in the best tradition of the Académie française.
This reminded me of my first working meeting in German, back in 1987. I was following everything until they suddenly starting talking about “flex”, which didn’t fit into the context and I completely lost the thread. I was quite miserable about my pathetic vocabulary until it eventually struck me that they were talking about “flags”. When pronounced with an educated German accent, this sounds like “flex”...

Übersetzungstechnisch. finanztechnisch, schmiertechnisch, wolkentechnisch, geschmackstechnisch, mnemotechnisch, messtechnisch - the list is endless of words guilded with a magical technisch. This seems to be a question of style & does not have much to do with technicalities. Instead of writing Dokumentation über Schmierung, engineers write schmiertechnische Dokumentation. Sounds grand does that!

I translate like this - messtechnisch geschultem Personal - personnel trained in the use of measurement equipment

Today i came across Schwerpunktstation. Both Leo and IATE call this a “distribution network core unit”. I have never heard of that, so I did the Google test and got just 1 hit from a Dutch website. So, it’s obviously not called that in the Anglo-Saxon world. I think that I will choose the closest quickly understandable term and call it a substation. Wouldn’t it be nice though if online dictionaries could do a plausibility check like this, as well as using votes from users, in a similar way to Websters Online “usage frequency” ?

Fachabteilung is a word to promote the importance of what us slobby English just call a department. Someone has in all seriousness called this a “speciality department” in no less than 2 online dictionaries. As a Fachmann is an expert, I suppose the idea in Fachabteilung is that the department exclusively employs experts and an Abteilung is then implicitly full of idiots?

Wikipedia shines here. The German entry for Konstrukteur correctly provides a link to the English site’s design engineer page. The only slight problem is that these two terms only correspond for mechanical engineering. German electrical or electronic design engineers usually use Dipl. Ing. Elektrotechnik / Elektronik to fill out their business cards. See Berufsbezeichnungen. Note that Germans have adopted Design as a German word, but they currently consider it to be exclusively arty-farty. Should you get an interview as a designer at Siemens they won’t be asking you about characteristic impedance, but they may well ask what you think of Shiro Kuramata.

I find the prominence given to tags by some tools amazing. In the example that I am showing, there are 4 words to be translated in the entire window. Almost all of the rest is irrelevant chaff for a translator, which only serves to distract from the real content, displacing what might be useful context above and below the bit that you are currently translating. This is obviously a tool designed by software engineers who were not provided with a sensible specification of what the planned product should do.

In the 1980s I was working in a research centre in London, where they had an incredibly expensive Canadian word processing system, where the secretaries needed 6 weeks of training to produce correctly formatted letters. Then we bought some Macs with WYSIWYG editors and overnight anyone could do it. 25 years later on we get tags.

Ho hum, Google can find 13,000 instances of Betriebsmedium, which some contributor to Leo has reasonably called operating medium. Wikipedia defines this as “In industrial engineering, a gaseous, vaporous, fluid or shapeless solid material that plays an active role in manufacturing processes ... “ Eeek. I just did a job for radiator valves where the client used Betriebsmedium, which is actually water. So I translated it as water, as I wasn’t sure what a British plumber would make of operating medium.

I was then entertained to read that calling a spade a spade is actually based on a mistranslation...

Protokoll is one of those words that often suffers at the hands of tired translators. Not just bashing in “protocol” requires some thought. The German Wikipedia article (Hurra for Wikipedia!) uses 1437 words to explain its various meanings. My problem is that automated German test equipment often puts test results into a Protokoll, which an English engineer of my generation calls a report. Maybe I´m too King Canute-like here and, as the tide of German-made test equipment circulates around the planet, industriously producing “protocols”, this usage may become common enough to be considered correct.

On the big screen today ... On the left, your favourite translation tool and on the right, the unadulterated original document that you are supposed to translate with all of its formatting, pictures and other useful context. This is the only solution that I know of to the irritating characteristic of most translation tools, that they seemingly deliberately strip off every possible bit of context that they can find. One agency that I worked for instructed you to print out every single page to resolve the problem. My screen is 1920 pixels wide and I don’t print anything. Wayhay! (See synchronise PDF)

Sometimes, it is hard to resist the Terminology database, as in this example:
Die Referenzpunktfahrt wird nach dem Start der Maschine ausgeführt.

Failure to resist the temptation may result in something splendid like this

• The reference point travel will be executed after the start of the machine.

Don’t you think that this version is better?

• When the machine starts, it will move to the reference point

Well I do. I suppose the real problem is that the entry in the database ought to read “move to the reference point” but, stripped of all context, it’s a brave translator who enters that as a translation for Referenzpunktfahrt.

I suppose that it’s an attempt to be precise, that produces sentences like this -

• Achse mit der Hand in eine mittige Lage fahren, so dass die Achse noch mindestens 50 mm fahren kann.

I know someone who gets very excited about this, where the same noun is reused within one sentence, in this example the word Achse.
Instead of writing this -

• Manually move the axis to a central position so that the axis can move at least 50 mm.

My advice is to use ”it”.

• Manually move the axis to a central position so that it can move at least 50 mm.

The context makes it quite clear what “it” refers to and that’s how a native English speaker would express themselves. On reflection I suppose that the German es is used differently to the English “it” although on the face of it they express precisely the same idea.

Another example

• Verbindungskabel am PC anschließen

Bad

• Connecting the connection cables to the PC

Better

• Connecting the cables to the PC

Over time, I have found that if jobs are long enough, the accumulated context makes it possible for the crossword puzzle that is a translation to be solved with a reasonable amount of confidence. The mistakes that I make at the beginning become clear, just like fakes in the art world. They are perfectly convincing at the time, but the more time elapses and the job progresses, the clearer the fake becomes and I can go back and correct it.

Unfortunately, this only works if the whole job is to be translated. If only half is to be translated as the other half was previously translated by someone else, there is a problem. The problem is that, as a freelance translator, I only get paid for the new bits. What do you do about the “fakes” which appear in the previously translated half. I’m afraid that I feel that I have to fix them, which is pretty silly, doing unpaid work, just to have a clear conscience when I deliver.

What do you do?

Vorliegen is another one of those fun words to spoil word by word translations.

The list of suggested translations from the various online dictionaries is not too bad - to be there, to be present, to have arrived, to be available, to be existent, to be on hand, be, be available, be known. However, one to one word translations don’t always work, despite the impression that you can build up when using terminology databases. How about this nice example:

• Es liegen noch keine Ergebnisse vor.
• The results haven't come in yet.

I have this picture of two amoeba, one English and one German, each representing the idea. Sometimes they overlap completely, sometimes they overlap a bit and sometimes there is only the one sort of amoeba. It would be nice if translation databases could deal with that.

Bearbeiter is one of those German words that is very unpleasant for translators into English, as it quite clearly means “the person who does the work” but that is a phrase that would make English native speakers giggle if ever any translator were foolish enough to put that in writing.

The list of suggested translations from the various online dictionaries certainly makes me giggle - adapter, reviser, arranger, compiler, processor, adaptationer (sic), issuer, originator, authorised person, authorised user, agent, editor, person in charge, one who abridges. (See a weakness of online dictionaries)

This is where you need full context to work out exactly what the customer means. I have just done an Excel word list where this appeared without any context at all. For health reasons I have stopped tearing out my hair, so I had to guess, using the name of the customer and the other individual words for context.

What do you do?

I am often frustrated by abbreviations in German. I suppose they are so popular as some expressions are so long in German. For example, in Berlin, everyone knows that BVG means Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe, ehemals Berliner Verkehrs (Aktien)Gesellschaft. When you have just arrived from Birmingham, it takes a while to work out what they are talking about.

What I would like is a tool that does a German spell check in a single pass, requiring no manual intervention, just producing an alphabetically sorted list of the failures. Those words that fail the spell check would include most of the abbreviations and give me a list to send to the customer at the start of the job. There is then a reasonable chance that answers would arrive before I have finished.

Of course I could just collect them manually as I work though, but that means I can’t send the list until I have finished. When I have finished, I don’t really want to go back a few days later, when the answers arrive, and open up the job again, when I am in the middle of something else.

This is a feature I would like to see included in translation tools

Context
Context is vital to produce the correct translation. Most translation tools however remove all of the context and offer a confusing jumble of tags and words from just a single sentence, the one that you are currently translating. Any pictures are stripped out, the position and role of the sentence on the page is lost as is the presentation which was carefully crafted to help you to understand the content.

The cause of the problem
This arises from the use of differing editing software to produce the original documents and the need for conversion tools to take a variety of source formats and produce one consistent format which can be understood by the translation tool. When the translation is complete, the inverse conversion is done to generate a document in the original format, ready to be opened by the original editing software.

The solution
My workaround to this is to open up a copy of the source document in PDF format. Whatever the original editing software was, if it was a document intended for printing, a PDF version can be produced at the click of a button. I copy a tag-free part of the sentence to be translated from the translation tool and search for this in the PDF document. Obviously I can’t do this for every sentence as it would take far too long.

If I can do this manually, software can do it too, and that is the feature that I would like to see in all translation tools.

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For years I thought that this was pronounced Protz, which Leo entertainingly translates as "swank" or "show-off". It was only recently that an American friend pointed out that it should be pronounced "prose". Giggle.

Google is very clever about working out where you are and offering search results to match. This can produce misleading impressions and is sometimes hard to control. This is why I have forced Kim's little helper II to use the UK Google when looking for English words and the German Google when looking for German words.

Testbetrieb!!!Sicherheitsschalter für *IBN teilweise deaktiviert!!!

Maybe it’s just engineers who have this curious affection for exclamation marks. You don’t hear engineers speaking with this sort of vehemence. It’s as if they doubt that you will believe them in writing and that by adding more exclamation marks it increases their credibility. Maybe it’s just my British tendency to understate things.

Whatever it is, I delete almost all exclamation marks.

(*IBN is this particular engineer’s shorthand for Inbetriebnahme)

Überlastung Q13.2: Leistungsschutz Hydraulikpumpe

This sort of abbreviated German is unfortunately common. The colon serves to replace everything that is not a noun, thus avoiding any possible grammatical challenges associated with assembling a full sentence. Encouraged by agency strictures that „die Terminologie ist verbindlich!“, you could translate this as

• Overload Q13.2: contactor hydraulic pump

This would score zero terminology errors and is almost comprehensible. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could actually use the context to solve the puzzle and use a few words other than nouns.

• The hydraulic pump contactor Q13.2 has cut out following an overload.

Messwert is one of those words where you can translate too much. Today I found „measuring value“ in the memory. In English it is just „measurement“. You don’t need value unless there is possible confusion in the context concerned about whether you are talking about the measurement process itself or the value that it produces.

Datenpflege sounds terrific in German, you are caring for your poor data, looking after it, nurturing it, maintaining it. Translate this as "edit". Sorry, us English-speakers are cold, heartless brutes as far as data is concerned.

Hochwertig is a really popular marketing word in German. In a technical context, I don’t think that you can often say "high value", so I usually stick "high quality" in. Maybe it’s me, what do you do?

This is a tricky subject. The crowning glory of years spent learning your trade for a German speaker is their job title. You will find plenty of Wikipedia articles about Berufsbezeichnungen, which shows the importance placed on this in contemporary German society. For an Englishman, this seems oddly proud and excessively precise. "Oh, I work in electronics" may be fine for a London cocktail party, but German clients will be devastated if you can’t produce an "official" translation for their job title (see berufe-lexikon) and will seriously doubt your competence.

I must however admit, that when trying to find a qualified (non-cowboy) electrician, plumber or carpenter in the UK, it would be nice if some things were as clear there as they are in the German-speaking world.

Some words and ideas that can be precisely expressed in German require a long explanation in English. Whenever I go to the cinema in Berlin, I have to be ready to hear Sitzriese from behind, which always sounds like a curse. This is because I am comparitively tall sitting down - i.e. I have a long back. I have found a medical term for this which is "hypomorph", which no normal cinema-goer in England is likely to know, they would just move, muttering quietly to themselves. Berliners being Berliners, I only escape Sitzriese if the seats behind me stay empty until the lights go down.

There are quite a few online German English dictionaries. None of them has all of the answers. I quite like webtranslate, for European Community stuff IATE is OK and both dict.cc and Leo have a lot of entries. Just search for „englisch deutsch Wörterbuch“ and you will find a long list of online dictionaries, or dictionary applications, some free, some not. In daily work, I use Kim's little helper II which uses all four of the above at the same time.

See the weaknesses of online dictionaries.

These days, many online dictionaries are built up by user contributions. You have to recognise that a lot of German-speakers speak English and comparitively few English-speakers speak German, and that if they do, they do not make so many contributions.

This means that online German-English dictionaries are often "polluted" by well-meaning but over-enthusiastic non-native speakers. I take a large pinch of salt with the English translations.