What linguistic challenges does your language pose. part 5
German to English
What about Sentence Structure? Aside from my occasional struggles with certain individual terminology, nothing has giving me more of a challenge than the difference between German and English sentence structures. Surely, restructuring the word order would not be as hard were it not for the all important theme/rheme considerations. This has been particularly difficult with some of the long-winded legal texts where slight changes in the word order can lead to slight, but significant changes in the overall message.
German-Swedish
Understanding passive as imperative. When translating from German into Swedish, I now and then encounter a problem with understanding the passive German tense.
For instance, quite often a technical text doesn’t include clear imperative instructions like “Check value A to judge if you need to stop the machine”, but rather “The value A has to be checked in order to judge if the machine needs to be stopped”. So the problem is who is supposed to check this. The reader of the text? Or should he/she get some expert to do this for him/her? Just like in English, in Swedish we often have clear instructions about who is going to do what in order to get this or that. German, otherwise a very precise language, isn’t that clear in this aspect. Very often the “pure” imperative is avoided in German, and passive is used instead.
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Another problem is an illogical order of different actions: “Press button A and then B. Before doing so, please check if the temperature is below 50 centrigrades”. For my understanding, it would be much better (and most technical writers would agree, I think), to structure the sentences in the same order as the actions have to be carried out. But this would be a life task.
German to Swedish (reply)
Quote ‘I now and then encounter a problem with understanding the passive German tense’.Reply ‘Wouldn’t that be a fault on the writer’s part?’
Reply to above:
Well, it’s not really seen as a fault, rather than a standard style used to “keep a certain level” – nobody seems to care if the message is confused! Apart from many passive constructions, in German texts you find very many nouns (originally from verbs) which often need to be translated as verbs.
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Example of garbled German (badly translated, but shows the case with noun): “The opening of this door is forbidden”
This needs to be translated at “It is forbidden to open this door”, or “You may not open this door” etc.
From my point of view, the written German in manuals and other documents is very focused on nouns and passive forms, and doesn’t have much in common with the standard spoken language.
These tips are brought to you by Translation Services UK who also offer a free translation service on their website. Remember, if you are going to get your document(s) translated then printed please make sure you use people and NOT software.
