The Translation Post

Paul Krugman, the celebrated New York Times columnist, is in Berlin this week, and will be speaking on the 22nd at the Freie Universität. In his latest blog entry, Krugman writes about the “jelly donut” myth, which still has traction in the US despite its blatant falsehood. JFK’s statement - “Ich bin ein Berliner” - was, of course, grammatically correct, but can be willfully misinterpreted as meaning “I am a jelly donut.” (A possible equivalent would be Pope Ratzinger saying “I am a New Yorker” and all of Germany thinking he meant the Reuben sandwich.)

Krugman is an extremely important voice in America at the moment. His latest book, “The Conscience of a Liberal,” explores the political underpinnings of widening inequality in the US. Krugman draws attention to the startling fact that the average US worker’s inflation-adjusted income has barely risen since the early 1980s - despite two decades of rising productivity. The earnings of those in upper-income brackets, however, have soared - particularly the earnings of the top 1 percent of the population - a fact Krugman attributes to the rise of movement conservatism and regressive tax and social policies.

As a NYT columnist, Krugman is an important whistle-blower and fierce opponent of the Bush administration’s policies. An economist by training, Krugman regularly provides valuable insights in his column and blog about the US economy and the current mortgage and credit crises. I’ll be extremely interested to see what Krugman has to say on Thursday.

The perceptive translator will notice that there are clear differences between the use of term “approximately” in German and English. Often abbreviated “ca.” (the term “circa” can be applied to all types of figures in German, not just to date estimations, as in English) “approximately” is used with much greater frequency in German texts. The proliferate and seemingly reflexive use of “ca.” in German is certainly related to the ease with which it can be inserted in front of any number, and perhaps also due to the pedantic focus on accuracy its use can convey (a German speciality). While the abbreviation “ca.” is often rendered annoyingly as “approx.” by translators (as if true allegiance to a source text is demonstrated with a superficial mimicry of its abbreviated forms), it is probably better to drop the term from the English text completely in many cases, particularly when its inclusion seems nonsensical, as in the following sentence I ran across recently: “In Baden-Württemberg wird die Luftqualität an derzeit ca. 41 Luftmessstationen regelmäßig überwacht.” So how many measurement stations are there? 41 and a half?

Here’s another good one, discussing a museum replica of President Kennedy’s Lincoln X-100: “Eine ganz besondere Einrichtung erlaubte es, den hinteren rechten Sitz um ca. 25 cm hydraulisch zu heben, um dem Präsidenten einen besseren Ausblick zu verschaffen.” Approximately 25 cm? Is the actual figure 25.3 cm? The translator should not feel obliged to slavingly transcribe this utterly useless insertion of “ca.”

The German tendency to freely adopt English terms and expressions has been widely observed. Yet beyond the butchering of the German language that can often result from the wholesale borrowing of English expressions, the German-to-English translator is confronted by a particular challenge when required to “re-translate” expressions which are putatively English but which have been invested with new meaning in German. For example, what exactly are “Servicedienstleistungen” other than just “Dienstleistungen”: service-services, perhaps?

The German use of the term “dumping” can also be highly befuddling. In English, a company can be accused of engaging in “price dumping” when it sells its products at extremely low prices to undercut competitors - the products are, so to speak, “dumped” on the market. From this perspective, the German neologism “Lohndumping” sounds particularly incongruous for the native speaker of English because “wages” cannot be “dumped” in any figurative sense.

It’s also confusing when English terms are used in German texts for no apparent reason. In a PowerPoint presentation I recently translated for a large German IT provider, for example, one slide discussed the regrettable tendency of customers to use service hotlines unnecessarily. This was identified as the “Hello Joe Problem.” What was the motivation for the invention of this phrase? Considering I’ve never met anyone in Germany named “Joe,” the name choice is all the more inexplicable.  Should this perhaps have been translation into English as the “‘Hallo Klaus Problem”?

Another comical malapropism is the German use of the expression “happy end,” which 82 million Germans have confused with “happy ending.” In English, of course, one is said to have “met a happy end” when one dies, which lends the German use of the expression a particularly macabre ring. Were the makers of the “Happy End” toilet paper brand aware of this linguistic mix up?