How to keep up-to-date with German when not living in Germany

One of the hazards of not living abroad is language loss. Language loss starts creeping up on you within a few years abroad and nibbles at the edges of your language skills. First, you start searching for words that you don’t use very often, and which come to mind easier in the new language. Then your friends back home start laughing when you open your mouth because you have started using syntactic or idiomatic constructions that are clearly translated from your new language. Among your fellow bilinguals in the new country, a new language starts emerging – the “mixed” language: for Germans, Genglish or Denglish, for Spaniards in Brazil or Portugal or Brazilians in Spanish-speaking countries, Portunhol, for Spanish-speakers in the U.S., Spanglish … I can’t think of a good word that mixes Russian and English, but these two get mixed as well, of course. Bilinguals hop easily from one language to the other and do not think much of it. But when they do think about it and some of them get scared and impose the “one language only” rule and try to keep to it.
Among translators, language loss is not such a big problem, because they use all their languages on a very regular basis, so the constant practice keeps the language alive. But for translators, another issue becomes vital – how do I keep up-to-date on the language/s of the country/ies that I don’t live in but which I need for my work?
Language, even though many of us might not be aware of it, changes at an astonishing speed. Not so much grammatically or phonetically, but definitely in terms of words and expressions used, new cultural references, new trends.
German, for example, has shown a very distinct trend toward using English words in many fields, so much so that German native translators that do not live in Germany tend to “overuse” German and translate “too much.”

So, for all of us, who need to keep up-to-date on our German – here a set of links to keep a least a little bit up-to-date with what’s going on in Germany and with the German language:
TV and TV news:
www.ard.de
www.tagesschau.de
www.zdf.de/
Newspapers:
www.zeit.de
www.nzz.ch
www.faz.de
www.sueddeutsche.de
Movies:
Netflix
Netflix streams quite a few movies in German and they generally have quite a few movies one can order. It’s not an exhaustive selection, but it’s better than nothing.
Radio:
Check for your favorite radio stations on the internet. Nowadays, most of them have an internet streaming option.
My favorite: www.berlinerrundfunk.de – It might not be the coolest radio station in the world, but it covers the region where I am from and has enough talking among the music that I get a sense of “normal spoken German.”

Generally, the internet is a great resource. It definitely helps in the “upkeep” of one’s language skills.

Editing

Somehow I end up doing a lot of editing. I was told that I am a good editor. Which was a surprise to me, I never considered myself to be overly anal, which is a characteristic I always attributed to good editors. Does that mean that the average editor is not very good?

My approach to editing is rather relaxed: I change things when they are obviously wrong or when, which is very common, a sentence needs to be rearranged because the syntax is a little off, but I do not put in changes if it’s a mere preferential change. I don’t feel the need to change all texts so they sound like “me.” But I do go over texts a few times in the attempt to catch everything, and I noticed that I need to allocate almost as much time to editing as to translating when I am edit my own translation.

A normal editing & proofreading process contains the following steps:

1. Put source and target texts side by side or use bilingual document and check for a) accurate translation; b) completeness – put in edits, preferably tracked (usually requested by client); c) consistency (terminology, numbers, etc.)

2. Go over clean target document. Check for adequacy in target language. If necessary adjust language.

3. Spell check.

An interim step with large documents is to make a list of recurring mistakes and check each of these in a global search & replace to make sure that all instances of the respective mistake have been detected.

Generally, I have to say, I enjoy editing. I can’t edit my own stuff – it’s hard to disengage myself from the source and target texts that are lodged in my head. To be able to adequately edit my own translations, I need at least one or two nights in between the translation and the edit. But I enjoy editing other people’s texts. Not exclusively, but simply as an activity that is completely different from translating.

Some editors don’t understand the fundamental difference between translating and editing. I’ve had editors rip my texts apart and declare they were bad translations, although there was not a single translation error in the text. It might not have been the most beautiful translated text in the world – every text can be improved upon, mine included – but it was absolutely correctly translated. I think every translator has run into problems like that. A good editor improves the text to achieve the one goal we have in our business, to make it sound “native” in the target language, so that you can’t tell it’s been translated. But a good editor also knows the difference between a good and bad translation. I have had good translations that were littered with edits and appeared to be completely red from all the tracked changes, and I have also had really bad translations where I would refuse to work with that specific translator again, but the changes did not look that major at first glance.

I suppose a good translation is where I ponder how to improve the text and actually enjoy the process and do not need to go into agonies researching terms and concepts and adding missing parts, and a bad translation is one that contains actual errors in meaning, where parts are missing and where I quickly get to the conclusion that a re-translation might be in order.

What I really enjoy is when I work in a translator/editor team and I get to see what I did wrong or what might need improvement or when I get to discuss certain issues with my counterpart. In that case, I learn something or I get to impart some bits of knowledge and when the job is sent out, we both know that we did a good job: translating and editing.

Perfect.

Machine translations

It seems that machine translations do become more and more popular. I have received several job offers over the past months that involved editing larger texts that had been machine-translated. I did not have time to do them, so I declined, but I was neither for or against – and edit is an edit, I thought. But it turned out that it was not so easy. Last week I finally got to work on a set of phrases that had been previously machine-translated, and I was horrified. There was nothing I could use. The meaning sometimes was there, but there was always something wrong. A space too many, maybe a word was singular instead of plural, or a word was capitalized that should not have been. Those “almost right” parts I left untouched, and got slammed by the quality control department of the client agency: wrong, wrong, wrong. The job description said to “edit” the machine translated parts, so I assumed that, since they did a machine translation in the first place, they were ok with segments that were overall ok in meaning, even if there were minor errors in them. But they were not. So, my conclusion: machine translation sucks! If I had translated the entire set of phrases on my own without a previously done translation, I would have been better. As it is, I had to change around 99% of the pre-translations so dramatically that it would have cost me less time to translate them on my own.

Here a few gems:

Fuer jeden Hauttyp was dabei – machine translated: for all loose screw-types something with it

sich die Frage zu stellen, ob man sie evtl. mal ausprobieren sollte – machine: itself this, to put, asks, whether one perhaps should try her/it/them out once

Eine Creme fuer meine Beduerfnisse, bzw. meine Haut -
one creams for my necessities, or my hits

Haut erhaelt alles, was sie braucht und wird dadurch schoener:
Skin gets everything more beautifully, which needs she/it and becomes, through it

Keine Ahnung. Gibt es bei der Werbung noch andere Ideen als das Produkt verkaufen zu wollen?!
no notion, is there to want to sell more ideas than the product with advertisement?!

Das man seinen Koerper damit pflegen kann -
This one his/its body with it can be in the habit of.

Funny translations – Quality issues

A colleague of mine just posted this on FB:
” Wenn Sie inhaliert werden, entfernen Sie zur Frischluft. Wenn die Atmung nicht oder wenn atmend schwierig ist, geben Sie künstliche Beatmung oder Sauerstoff durch ausgebildetes Personal.” (found by Ulrike in: http://online1.ispcorp.com/MSDS/AGSOLEX%208_DE_D.pdf)

It’s a perfect example of a really horrible translation of some type of manual. When translated into English, it would look like this:

“When you are inhaled, remove to fresh air. When breathing is not or when breathing is difficult, provide artificial respiration or oxygen by qualified personnel.

The English actually sounds a little more correct than the German version – which would point to the fact that the source language for this sentence was English.

It’s amazing how many really, really bad translations are out there. And I am sure, in view of the current economic situation and the fact that many agencies and translators stopped using proofreaders because of price drops and fewer customers, the overall quality of translations over the past year has dropped dramatically. It’s a pity that most of the texts that are translated are highly confidential. It would be interesting to see whether I am right.

I had a case a few months ago where I customer came back and complained that a translation I had done was badly done . The translation I had prepared was sent back to me and had been heavily edited, but all the edits were stylistic edits and mainly reflected specific linguistic preferences the customer had. None of this had initially been communicated to me. There was no reference material, no customer-approved glossary, no translation memory that I could have used as guidance. Quite a few terms had to be left in English, which I had not known, in case of synonyms I had almost invariably chosen the one the customer did not like. All in all, a mess. After the customer complained, the agency asked that I review the customers marked-up version of my translation and prepare an answer commenting on those changes. It took me several hours to prepare the required paper. A very annoying exercise, although I managed to re-use a similar piece from a previous similar case, and I refuted all of the disputed “translation mistakes”.

This could have been avoided, if the customer had been “educated” properly. However, I don’t know whether the agency, in fact, tried to explain to the customer what they needed and what to expect from a translation that is done by somebody who does not know anything about the entity in question and has no reference material, etc. And also what constitutes a “wrong” translation as opposed to a “right” translation. Maybe they did and the customer did not think it important. Most people don’t think much about it.

However, the fact remains, the customer paid a lot of money for the translation to be done – the job had gone through the hands of two agencies. Which means that the word price I received was probably 50% less than what the customer actually paid. And any preparatory work that would have needed to be done somehow did not seem to have been done. When I subsequently asked whether anybody but me had worked on the translation – the usual practice is to have a translator and then a proofreader/editor or even one proofreader and then an editor, but only the largest agencies can afford such luxury – I was told, no, I was the only one. Which is what I’ve been trying to explain – I know that I am a good translator. I get enough feedback to know that I am doing ok. But even I know that one person is never enough. When I complete a translation, I like to let it “breathe” for a day or two. Invariably, when I go back to the text, I a) find minor errors or inconsistencies that need cleaning up that I did not see the first time around (the “equivalency” principle, the target text needs to be equivalent to the source text), and b) often put larger edits into the target language text to make it sound more “native” in the target language (the “adequacy” principle, the target text must be an adequate rendition of  the target language. Ideally, adequate enough to sound ‘native’). Since we usually do not have that much time and can’t let translations “breathe”, we have proofreaders and editors who do it for us. It’s a safety net for us as well as the agencies. That’s why the word price we receive is well below the price the customer actually pays. Well, this safety net seems to be disappearing. I’ve heard from several agencies that they don’t use proofreaders on a regular basis anymore to save money. Often, this is not communicated to the translator. And this is how we get such gems as the one above.

Gabler Wirtschaftslexikon Online

A colleague of mine just alerted me to an interesting German source – a dictionary of economic terms in German. It’s the Gabler Wirtschaftslexikon. It’s not a bilingual dictionary, so I don’t get the English terms and definitions on the same page, but on top of the page you will find a link for LEO (www.leo.org) that brings you to the English translation of the term. Very neat.
Here’s the link for the Gabler lexicon:

http://wirtschaftslexikon.gabler.de/

Thanks, Susanne!

Job sharing

I keep stumbling over the term “job sharing arrangement” in various texts. It turned out that my agony – trying to find an adequate term in German – was unnecessary. The term was transferred “as-is” into German: “Job-Sharing”

Job-Sharing
Here a definition from a job search website:
(http://www.qualifizierte-teilzeitarbeit.de/stellenmarkt/jobsharing.html)
“Job-Sharing bedeutet wörtlich übersetzt Arbeitsplatzteilung. Für Deutschland findet sich eine gesetzliche Definition in $ 13 TzBfG. Danach liegt Arbeitsplatzteilung vor, wenn der Arbeitgeber mit zwei oder mehreren Arbeitnehmern vereinbart, dass diese sich die Arbeitszeit an einem Arbeitsplatz teilen. Unter TopSharing wird ein partnerschaftliches Führungsmodell verstanden, ein Job-Sharing in Top-Positionen. Der Begriff TopSharing wurde von Julia Kuark und Hans Ulrich Locher 1998 in der Schweiz geprägt.”

German comma rules

I just received a request in from a colleague, who keeps getting confused by the differing comma rules in German and in English. I suffer from the same affliction. It’s not so much not knowing the rules – I know the German comma rules very well – it seems that, when submerged in a translation, when going from English to German, syntactically my brain remains in English and accordingly applies the English comma rules, even though the sentence has already been transferred to German. I am only able to catch this and fix the mistakes when I edit the text after the translation has been completed. Very disturbing. It seems to be a common form of interference because I have seen this problem in the translations of various other translators as well.

Well, for everybody who needs to brush up on the German comma rules, here is a link to a PDF that explains them very clearly in a compact way and gives examples.

http://www.denkweite.de/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/komma.pdf

Hairy Things

I had no plans for Memorial Day, other than maybe going out for dinner with friends and accepted a translation that falls a bit outside my usual field. It concerns hair products for perms (curls and straightening) and hair coloring. The texts contain product instructions and are, as such, not really difficult, but they contain a few tricky items: certain chemicals and terms specific to the stylist profession. Who, for example, knows what a “straight perm board” is? Or a “color wheel”? Easier ones were a “wide toothed comb”, although not to be found in a dictionary, googling “Afrohaare” and “Kamm” gave me the term “grobzinkiger Kamm”. Nonetheless, the job involves a lot of googling, and I am not sure yet whether I will get by without actually calling up a stylist in Germany who specializes in hair straightening to ask him or her for a few questions on terms I am not sure about.

While I was googling around to find the terms I needed, I stumbled across a real gem in terms of really awful German. As a linguist specializing on bilingualism and code-switching, however, I have to admit that this is really great. I thought I’d share:

Solange erinnern kann war es mein Traum zu haben blonde Highlights. “Kein Problem” Ich höre, Sie weinen – kaufen eine Highlighting-Kit finden Sie Ihren Friseur – Traum erfüllt! In theory its sounds easy – in reality there’s one small complication, I have ginger hair and as a result there is a pigment that makes changing my hair colour, especially to blonde, excessively difficult, bordering on impossible. In seiner Theorie klingt einfach – in der Realität gibt es eine kleine Komplikation, ich habe Ingwer Haare und als Folge gibt es ein Pigment, das die Änderung meiner Haarfarbe, insbesondere auf blonde, übermäßig erschweren, an der Grenze unmöglich. My sister-in-law, a hairdresser, advised me that to have it done professionally so much peroxide would be needed to achieve the colour I wanted I would no doubt come away with a burnt scalp. Meine Schwester-in-law, ein Friseur, riet mir, dass Sie es getan professionell so viel Peroxid wäre notwendig, damit die Farbe Ich wollte, dass ich keinen Zweifel, da sie mit ein Brandopfer Kopfhaut.

So with professionally done highlights been out of the question I decided to give some DIY blonde kits a go. Also mit professionell gemacht worden Highlights aus der Frage, die ich beschlossen, einige blonde DIY-Kits ein gehen. Off I trotted to my local Boots and was amazed at the choice of blonding kits available. Aus trottete ich auf meinen lokalen Stiefel und war erstaunt über die Wahl des blonding-Kits zur Verfügung. I was completely bamboozled as to which one to buy. Ich war völlig bamboozled, welche ein zu kaufen. I decided to go for a recognised brand, I figured the extortionate price tag would be justified by the quality of the product – but alas no. Ich entschloss mich zu gehen für eine anerkannte Marke, habe ich die extortionate Preisschild wäre gerechtfertigt, von der Qualität des Produkts – aber leider nicht. Home I went and locked myself away in the bathroom for the afternoon – a complete waste of time and money seen as I came out with the exact same colour hair I went in with. Home I ging und mich weg gesperrt im Bad für den Nachmittag – eine komplette Verschwendung von Zeit und Geld als ich kam mit der exakt gleichen Farbe Haar ging ich mit. A few weeks later, trying not to get too despondent, I visited Boots again to try another branded DIY blonde kit. Ein paar Wochen später, versuchen nicht, um zu verzweifelt, ich besuchte Stiefel erneut zu versuchen eine andere Marke blonde DIY-Kit. But again my stubborn red hair refused to change colour. Aber nochmals meine roten Haare hartnäckig geweigert, wechselt die Farbe.

“Ah well” I thought, “me and blonde streaks just weren’t meant to be”. “Ah gut” Ich dachte, “Ich und blonden Streifen waren nicht nur Anspruch auf”. Then I saw Sun In advertised in a magazine – “Natural sun kissed highlights” it promised. Dann sah ich Sonne im beworbenen in einer Zeitschrift – “Natürliche Sonne geküsst Highlights” versprach er. I couldn’t resist giving it a try; maybe it would be third time lucky. Ich konnte nicht widerstehen, indem es einen Versuch, vielleicht wäre es dritten Mal Glück. I marched down to Boots once more, I was on a mission, I knew what I wanted and I wouldn’t be satisfied until I had it. Ich marschierte auf Stiefel noch einmal, ich war auf einer Mission, ich wusste, was ich wollte, und ich wäre nicht zufrieden, bis ich es hatte. Luckily they had the required product. Zum Glück hatten sie die geforderten Produktqualität. It was available in Gentle, Lemon, and Super. Es war in Gentle, Zitrone, und Super. Not having much look with other highlighting products I decided Sun In Super was the only way to go and I grabbed it like it was going out of fashion, dashed to counter to pay, and ran all the way home (well, nearly). Nicht viel, schauen mit anderen Produkten hervorgehoben So entschied ich mich im Super war der einzige Weg zu gehen, und ich packte es wie es ging aus der Mode, gestrichelte, um zu zahlen, und alles lief der Weg nach Hause (na ja, fast).

Here’s the link, if you want to check the site out directly:

http://www.blonde-ambition.co.uk/_de.php?url=sun-in.shtml

The Wait

I have no work on my desk for the first time in months, I think, which is a strange feeling. On the other hand, I had already started fighting against burn-out, so it’s nice to have a bit of time off. My time-off activity, however, is spent with reading really interesting stuff: business risk, equity risk, asset risk, project risk, delevering comparable risk and relevering it again for a comparable project or business. This is all related to the WACC of a company (WACC = weighted average cost of capital), and I suspect that I already forggot half of it, but, in general, it’s quite an interesting topic. How to estimate a company’s cost of capital, how to estimate risk and how to calculate potential costs of planned projects and the effect this might have on financing issues, the capital structure of a company and potential increases in cost of capital – and ultimately the value of a company’s shares… Since I don’t have any “play money” that I might invest in the stock market at the moment, these are just theoretical musings. Also, I have to admit that I have not dealt with cost of capital issues in any of my translations yet. One can only hope, but it makes more sense to brush up on one’s knowledge of financial statements (income statement, balance sheet, cash flow statement, and statement of shareholders’ equity) as well as any off-balance sheet-related items to prepare for financial translations.

Waiting for a job can, of course, be done in various ways. With a blackberry in my pocket, I usually take care of errands that I didn’t get to when there was work: laundry, food shopping, other shopping, cleaning and tidying up, meeting friends and clients for lunch, research work in the library, etc. A friend of mine, on the other hand, sits down and updates her resume and sends it out to agencies – everybody she has not yet communicated with or has not heard from in a while. Agencies tend to update their contractor databases once in a while. It’s always good to be on top of the pile. Also, I have heard that it sometimes takes agencies quite a while to get back to you. Six months or a year later… Better to send the resume out now. There might be work coming in in a year’s time!

My current wait, however, stems from the fact that I received a phone call from a project manager at an agency who needed to place 25,000 words (a good translator can do about 3,500 words per day on an average text), which need to be done until Friday. I said I’d do 5-6,000. Unfortunately, I have not seen the text yet. Chances are, it’s another financial statement. If I am lucky, they deliver last year’s translation for comparison purposes. So, I am waiting here, slightly nervous, because I haven’t seen the piece yet and am not quite sure what’s in store for me. A year ago, I would not have agreed to take the job – and, in fact, I can still refuse the job, although that would seriously damage my standing with this particular agency – but I am now more confident in my abilities. But you never know. There is always a risk.

Earnings Season

Earnings season is a big hit when you translate finance-related texts. Over the past week or so, I’ve had several annual reports pass my desk. I love annual reports – especially if they are identical with last years and I just need to change numbers. Similar to legal texts, they are also very formulaic. At first, they seem to be absolutely incomprehensible, but once you have done a few, you realize that it is the same concepts, and therefore phrases, over and over. I doubt that I will ever read the notes to financial statements as closely as when I translate them. A little bit of knowledge of accounting also comes in handy. It’s rather different when you translate the notes to the financial statements and can appreciate how much “off-balance sheet” reporting is possible. Suddenly, a rather boring job turns into something akin to an action movie. Honestly, there are companies I’d never invest in just by seeing how many items they pushed into the off-balance sheet section. I haven’t checked, but I am sure their assets and liabilities would look rather different, if these “assets” were transformed into the “liabilities” that they in fact are. But that is not really my job – it’s just the added value I derive from translating financial reports.

German accounting language, unfortunately, is not as easily accessible to me as is English accounting language. My accounting and FSA (financial statement analysis) knowledge comes from several classes I took at NYU a few years back – in English. I doubt that I would be capable at all to translate annual statements if it weren’t for these classes. But I would like to take similar classes in German or, at the least, find a German accounting book to read up on it in German. What I found is that a German “Abgrenzungsposten” is a deferred item and can be a “deferred liability” or a “deferred asset”. I needed to translate it into English and did not know what it was, so I drew up the basic accounting equation (Assets = Liabilities + Equity) and below the related T-accounts to figure out from the context whether the item in question should be considered an asset or a liability. I am still not sure whether my translation was correct, but nobody has complained so far.

In one of the reports I had on my desk last week, I stumbled across something really nice: “Erdienungszeitraum.” The section dealt with a stock option plan that the company in question had introduced. I had, of course, no clue what was meant with “Erdienungszeitraum.” You’ll find out what it is, if you try to define the meaning of the word: it’s a German compound noun referring to a period in which you earn the right to possess something, so basically it’s a “vesting period.” It took me a while to get to that point. Similar words in that regard were:

erforderlicher Diensterbringungszeitraum – requisite service period

angepasster Diensterbringungszeitraum – derived service period

Erdienungszeitraum – vesting period, vesting schedule

Luckily, googling the words helped to solve this puzzle and provided me with a source that proved that my initial guess was correct. The investor relations people of GPC Biotech were nice enough to provide the English translations to these terms in their publication:http://www.teleboerse.de/939378.html