Once again, gonna let another smart lady talk at length and encourage you to listen respectfully.
As I also commented directly on this video, having translated my fair share of German-->English texts, I can confirm all of this. Word-for-word is seldom the optimal choice when engaging in translation work. German sentence structure can be so damn dense there's zero point in trying to reproduce it in English. You break it up into several shorter sentences that convey the overall meaning as completely as possible. It's often chasing down a blind alley to find those one-to-one equivalents, however tempting...you'll be halfway down that road and realize wait a minute, wait a minute, let me take a bird's eye view and see if there isn't a better way to convey these ideas that sounds like English as people actually speak it instead of this stilted literal rendering....you produce a paragraph that beautifully captures what the German is saying in a single compound sentence. Your English not only must convey all the ideas and concepts found in the original German, it needs to be readable, conversant English on the other end.
This is why it's always best to engage a native speaker of the target language to do the translation. Which means you want me and not a German speaker to do your German-->English translation work. Not saying I can't do English-->German translation, but I am saying that I lived in Germany for a year and some change versus someone who was literally born there and spent their formative years growing up in that culture and who speaks German as their Müttersprache. Once they learn English well, they're the best ones to translate English texts into readable German, not me. They might rely on or consult me to clarify the English source, to double check their understanding is correct, but that's about it. I don't have the deep cultural understanding of German life & culture beyond my book learning & study abroad experience to write long German texts with the proper nuance, etc. But I can take a dense German text and render it into beautifully written English that flows. Not just because I know German well but because I'm a pretty good writer in my native language generally.
As a total aside, I've long dreamed of being a German language consultant for a North American Japanese Anime distributor, to make sure they're handling the translation of German words rendered phonetically in Japanese into proper Deutsch and not Dinglish. I don't know if such a job is commercially viable (probably not) but a guy can still dream.
Recent Comments