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The Awful German Language (1880)

(faculty.georgetown.edu)
186 points nalinidash | 1 comments | 16 May 25 04:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.224s | source
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rawbert ◴[16 May 25 06:21 UTC] No.44002326[source]▶
As a developer working in a German company the question of translating some domain language items into English comes up here and there. Mostly we fail because the German compound words are so f*** precise that we are unable to find short matching English translations...unfortunately our non-native devs have to learn complex words they can't barely pronounce :D

Most of the time we try to use English for technical identifiers and German for business langugage, leading to lets say "interesting" code, but it works for us.

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marcosscriven ◴[16 May 25 08:22 UTC] No.44002985[source]▶
I think the issue of German compound nouns is seriously overegged. In almost all cases, it’s essentially the same as English, except with some spaces. It’s not like suddenly a short compound word expresses something that couldn’t be in English.
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top_sigrid ◴[16 May 25 10:10 UTC] No.44003598[source]▶
This is so true. My favourite example is when Top Gear made fun of the German word "Doppelkupplungsgetriebe" by spelling it, when it is quite literally the translation to "dual-clutch transmission". It stil is hilariously funny, but you cannot conclude that German is weird with these words.
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hengheng[dead post] ◴[16 May 25 11:36 UTC] No.44004134[source]▶
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1. MrJohz ◴[16 May 25 12:13 UTC] No.44004476[source]▶
On the other hand, as a Brit, I find German abbreviations oddly cutesy and childish — although I think that's just preferring what one grew up with!

That said, I don't think you can discuss German jargon without talking about Beamtendeutsch. I'm fairly comfortable reading in German — I'm slower than I am in English, but I can, say, read a book in German. Then I'll get a letter from some Amt somewhere and it'll be utterly unintelligible. Worse, I'll pass it to my German partner, and she has no idea what it says, and we'll need to go and find someone to translate the document we've just got back into regular German. I'll take "appendicitis" any day of the week over having to learn whole new grammar constructs just to interpret an official document!